I'm Working While They're Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions

Citation

Beulen, E. (2012), "I'm Working While They're Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions", Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 89-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538291211221979

I'm Working While They're Sleeping: what do we still need to learn about outsourcing across time zones?

Introductory review

For decades, Erran Carmel has published on the topic of global sourcing and offshoring information technology. In his most recent book, I'm Working While They're Sleeping: Do We Need to Work in Different Time Zones? co‐authored with Alberto Espinosa, Carmel focuses on how to bridge time zone differences. The relevance of this topic is indisputable in an increasingly globalized world. This book can be recommended for both practitioners and academics. It illustrates in detail how to make outsourcing work when faced with client‐vendor relationships that span significant time zone differences.

Offshore outsourcing has been on the rise for many decades. According to IDC, worldwide IT spending has seen an annual compounded growth rate of more than 5 percent since 1995, to almost US$1.5 trillion in 2009 (Minton, 2010). Overall, average IT spending increased by 4.4 percent in 2011 and is expected to increase by an additional 4.7 percent in 2012 (Potter et al., 2012, p. 1). According to Gartner, the BPO market is still on the rise as well, with a 2012 worldwide growth rate of 3.3 percent anticipated (Brown and Yeates, 2011). The Asia/Pacific BPO market is still underdeveloped and under‐explored in terms of market opportunity, size, and scope when compared to other more mature markets. This presents opportunities to BPO service providers that are willing to invest in the region (Singh, 2011, p. 1). Both the IT and BPO industries leverage time zones heavily, which is required to meet increasing global demand – now and in the future.

Carmel and Espinosa present core concepts in less than 60 pages for readers who need a quick primer on the topic, with the remainder devoted to providing in‐depth insights into the implications of working across significant time zones. Carmel and Espinosa identify and explain key methodologies and concepts, such as following‐the‐sun versus round‐the‐clock, basic time zone configurations, and time shifting. He also tackles the effectiveness and efficiency of dispersion, which is embedded by reference to the work of Siebdrat et al. (2009). However, one deficiency is that the dip in efficiency for “same building” and “same city” remains unexplained.

The book also provides rules of thumb for the “rule of two”: the optimal number of time zones in a single project is two. However, for serving large international companies, different time zone configurations might be considered to meet their requirements. This deviation from the “rule of two” will undoubtedly impact efficiency and effectiveness.

Furthering the debate

There are two white spots in the book. The first white spot is related to the impact of time zones on business representatives. The impact will be different by type of activity: services versus projects. As the nature of these activities is different. The focus of the book is predominantly on directly involved professionals, it should be noted that time zones also have an impact on business representatives. Kikuchi (2006) claimed that “there is a circular causation between increased connectivity via a network and trade creation” (p. 6). Over time, the availability of technology has overcome Kikuchi's argument. However, an impact on business representatives remains in those companies who decide to set up delivery centers or shared service centers in different time zones, or those who outsource to an external service provider with delivery centers operating in different time zones. Smith and Blanck (2002) correctly identified business representatives as “weakly linked players.” Working in different time zones limits their involvement and impacts their effectiveness and efficiency in providing timely guidance to dispersed teams. Understanding business representative involvement requires some attention. Business managers' decisions and leadership styles are open to question (Lee‐Kelley and Sankey, 2008).

To understand the impact of business representatives better, a clear separation of each type of activity is required. Carmel and Espinosa differentiate between “coupled and decoupled” and “follow the sun and round the clock.” “Coupled” and “round the clock” are the (managed) service pair; the project pair is “decoupled” and “follow the sun.” The degree of interaction is different for these pairs, resulting in different risk profiles (Beulen et al., 2005). There is no difference for information technology or business processes. For understanding the impact for the business manager, the ITIL processes incident, service level and change management are used. The incident and service level process is linked to the (managed) service pair. This is the least researched pair; most research concentrates on projects instead. An interruption of the service and/or a missed service level directly impacts the business representative and end user. An incident requires immediate action from dispersed teams, depending on the priority of the incident and the agreed upon service levels. This, in turn, requires predefined communication to a (central) helpdesk. If the call center agent is not able to resolve the incident, second and third line support professionals must be available to resolve the incident. Moreover, they must be available around the clock – either physically in the office or by an on‐call duty with the ability to remotely access the appropriate systems. Availability of senior support professionals is often the main difficulty in adequately resolving incidents. This requires cross‐training and more senior pyramids, which impacts the efficiency of working in different time zones. Directing by the shared service center or the outsourcing service provider goes beyond the basic time zone configuration. This requires a detailed analysis of required capabilities and competencies by the hour: service hours and out of service hours on week days, service hours and out of service hours on weekends, and end‐of‐period closure (month, quarter and/or end of year).

Change management is linked to the project pair. The impact of shift work and dispersed work is researched to a far larger extent. In addition to Carmel's earlier work (book publications: Carmel, 1999; Carmel and Tjia, 2005), others such as van Fenema, Kotlarsky and Oshri published extensively about this topic (Kotlarsky et al., 2008a, b; Oshri et al., 2008a, b; Vlaar et al., 2008). The focus of this group of researchers is predominantly on the involved professionals, not on business representatives. Here we take a closer look at the change management process. To start the implementation of any change, an approval process is required. The approval process is not different if time zones are leveraged. For decision making, collaborative tools, including document management systems, teleconferencing and video conferencing are available. Most business managers are used to decision making within a global setting.

Related to the initial decision making process, project governance requires attention in projects that leverage time zones. The dispersed project team reports to the steering committee. The members of the steering committee also have to understand the implications of working if different time zones in order to make decisions that are in the best interest of the project. If there is, for example, a delay in the project, the steering committee has to decide on how to resolve the problem; this requires an operational understanding of working between different time zones. One of the advantages to reading this book is that this particular knowledge gap may be bridged.

After the decision to implement the change, the design requires a different type and level of involvement from business representative involved in projects that leverage time zones. A high degree of interaction between business representatives and the dispersed project team is required in these circumstances. Will business representative participation constitute a full‐time endeavor to ensure the best possible availability for the project? Will the business allow representatives to participate full time in design activities? Large organizations are more able to facilitate full‐time participation due to scale. Business representative involvement results in coordination and priority issues. These issues continue in the next stage – the build stage. Project governance needs to be solid, and the project team and the business representatives, if appropriate, need to deal with changing requirements after the initial change approval. This is more complex but not completely different in nature from projects that leverage time zones. Also, with respect to testing, leveraging time zones is not an issue. The location of the testers is not impacted by the location of the project team or business representatives. Technology bridges any time zone differences in this issue area. Typically the project team members, if required, travel for testing. If the testing is successful, the change will be implemented and signed off. The professionals are then available for the next project.

The impact of time shifting, working outside regular office hours, is addressed in chapter 8: “Health and well‐being”. This area includes the second white spot of the book. This white spot can be broken down into explaining the significant difference in willingness to work in shifts between fresh graduates and juniors in developing countries versus developed countries and the average duration of shift work in terms of years of their career. Carmel and Espinosa mention for health and well‐being several good actionable items, including buying breakfast or dinner for employees who time shift from the office, transportation, recreation facilities and providing beds for napping or even sleeping. This facilitates shift work. The people side of corporate social responsibility in developing countries is mostly linked to blue collar workers. Blue collar workers require stricter regulations to protect their interest but also aspire to join the world economy (Hart and Christensen, 2002). This has not changed since Christiansen wrote it in 2002, and it is still a valid statement in 2012.

However, the impact on the human well‐being of white collar workers should not be overlooked (Stoner et al., 2009). Shift work has an impact on job satisfaction and retention (Wickramasinghe, 2010). Shift work has social implications and potentially results in a disrupted work‐life balance and changing interaction with the co‐workers. The general consensus is that white collar workers have different options and leverage those options in their professional work environments. Currently, despite of the global economic situation, a high percentage of professionals in developing countries frequently change jobs. However, most of them remain in the same job sector. Although in some countries, Argentina for example, professionals may also leave their current job or industry and continue their careers outside the sector (Beulen, 2009). This might also partly be related to improving their career perspective.

The question that remains is whether it is reasonable to expect fresh graduates to identify and understand the consequences of shift work at the start of their career. Recent graduates in developing countries might take this for granted; where in other geographies, such as Europe and North America, this is not taken for granted. How can this difference be explained? In addition, it might be relevant to explore the composition of a team that operates within a shift work framework. Are all levels in dispersed teams equally working in time zones?

Fortunately, shift work is not expected throughout their lifetimes. In my experience, graduates and junior professionals are the main pool of workers who work in shifts. Most more senior professionals (+5 years of professional experience) work predominantly within regular office hours. In addition, if these senior professionals have to work outside regular office hours, this is mostly related to planned meetings. Only in emergency cases are more senior professionals required to work outside regular office hours, and most of them have limited on‐call duties. If this observation is indeed correct, it might also be one explanation for the success of the shift work business model in developing countries within the few last decades. However, this requires rigorous research to confirm.

Conclusion

In short, time zone differentials require additional attention from both academics and practitioners, as time zones differences can be used to absorb continuously increasing demand and service level demands from developed countries. The topics related to the impact on business representatives and the well‐being of professionals need further research. Understanding the impact on business representatives of working in time zones better will result in an increased effectiveness of time zone working. The expected improvement will most likely be limited for project and might be significant for (managed) services. This will as well enable increasing the onshore – offshore percentage resulting in improved saving profiles. Regarding the well‐being of professionals from my judgment the impact might be limited, as professionals are not exposed to shift work for their full career. The current service delivery model of all tier 1 multinationals and all pure players is heavily leveraging shift work for their fresh graduates and juniors only. However if my observation is incorrect the current service delivery models will be no longer sustainable in the near future. This will cause a serious impact on our economy as there is a large dependency on the large resources pools operating out of developing countries in shifts.