4-page Case Study - Posted 4/3/2008

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Avanade

IT Consultancy Breaks Down Barriers to Global Collaboration with Productivity Tool

When a global retailer turned to the IT consultants at Avanade to redesign its e-commerce Web site, Avanade assembled an international team of experts—designers and project managers in the United States and application developers in India. The 11.5 hour time difference and network latency issues introduced a unique set of collaboration challenges. To address these challenges, Avanade deployed Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007 software to the project team. The India team used the offline capabilities to maintain productivity even when network latency issues prevented them from accessing other Web-based resources. The U.S. team used the transparent discussion threads to quickly respond to developer queries. Using Office Groove 2007, Avanade expanded its collaboration capabilities across time zones and reduced issue response time from 4 days to 24 hours.

Situation

Seattle, Washington–based Avanade, an IT consultancy founded in 2000 by Accenture and Microsoft Corporation, delivers mission-critical, Microsoft® technology–based solutions to more than 2,800 companies around the world. With 42 offices in 22 countries, the Avanade international network of IT experts collaborates night and day to drive business performance results for its customers.

Using the offline capabilities and issue-tracking tools of Office Groove 2007, we collaborated more effectively with our offshore team in India, reducing issue response time from 4 days to 24 hours. Matt Dinovo Principal Solution Developer, Avanade

One customer, a major global retailer, turned to Avanade for help in restructuring its e-commerce Web site. Avanade’s role was to provide project management as well as solution delivery. “Several different work streams were part of this solution,” says Senior Solution Developer Matt Dinovo. “Avanade was responsible for integrating all of them and delivering the final product to the customer.”

The Avanade team included designers and project managers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and application developers in Mumbai, India. “Our onshore teams were responsible for the design, the overall application architecture, and the day-to-day project management,” Dinovo explains, “while the development and execution of the solution was done offshore in India.”

To expedite collaboration and communication between these multisite work groups, Avanade established project workspaces using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We had solution-level SharePoint sites and Avanade project team SharePoint sites, but nothing was granular enough to speak to just the design and development focus,” says Dinovo. The project management team found SharePoint Server 2007 to be an effective tool for managing solution-level documentation collaboration, but, due to latency issues with the wide area network (WAN) in India, the group needed a different tool to resolve time-sensitive issues and to track discussion threads.

“With SharePoint, the India team’s ability to add and reply to issues and post questions on the discussion boards was occasionally hampered by the latency created with having the SharePoint server in the United States,” Dinovo says. “We would post a document or a discussion thread and there would be no way to know if the development team in India even received it.”

“We would wait for our daily SharePoint alert e-mail,” says Kedar Paralkar, Associate Manager, Avanade Technology Group, India Delivery Center. “Unfortunately, sometimes the alerts didn’t come through and we weren’t able to move ahead with our work. Every missed alert meant a twelve hour delay, at least, due to the time difference between Mumbai and the U.S.”

Team members began using the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client for communications, but the single-threaded nature of the messages created challenges for the project management team. “An India team member would send an e-mail to a specific design team member, and the project lead would not know whether the designer answered the question, what the timeliness was, or what the accuracy of the response was,” Dinovo explains. “We had no way to trace the discussion threads.”

Organizational policies and e-mail security restrictions also prevented exchanging certain type of files through e-mail. “Some specific types of files would not be allowed as e-mail attachments and hence be stripped off,” says Paralkar. “We would then need the re-named file resent, which added another day to the response time.”

The project management team explored using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server workflow collaboration engine to communicate work items between the onshore and offshore teams. Although message delivery was reliable, Team Foundation Server also proved to be problematic because it lacked automatic message alerts. “Team members would have to periodically open Visual Studio and check to see if they had any new messages,” says Dinovo. “We didn’t know when the offshore team had posted a message, and they didn’t know when we’d responded. Our goal was to respond within 24 hours, but with all of these issues it was taking three to four days.”

In keeping with its commitment to continually improve customer value, Avanade quickly began seeking a way to enhance collaboration and reduce response time. “We needed an innovative solution,” says Dan Taylor, Senior Solution Developer. “We had a turnaround problem, we had a traceability problem, and we had a network latency problem. We needed a way to collaborate with the offshore team that was close to being real time, that allowed us to track discussion threads, and that circumvented the network latency issues.”

Solution

Solution developers at Avanade are skilled innovators and draw upon their in-depth knowledge of Microsoft products to solve technology-related challenges. When the onshore team needed a more efficient, accurate, and timely way to communicate with offshore application developers, Dinovo proposed a solution. “I’d previously used Microsoft Office Groove® 2007 as a collaboration tool on a multisite project in the United States,” he explains. “We used Groove 2007 very successfully, and I began to wonder if the software would be flexible enough to help us collaborate between countries, not just within the U.S.”

We had solution-level SharePoint sites and Avanade project team SharePoint sites, but nothing was granular enough to speak to just the design and development focus. Matt Dinovo Principal Solution Developer, Avanade

The India team began using the offline capabilities of Office Groove 2007 to fundamentally change the way it collaborated with the onshore team. “With Office Groove 2007, the discussion threads, tools, and data were stored directly on our computers,” Paralkar says. “This made it possible for us to keep working even when it was the middle of the night for the U.S. team or when we could not access the SharePoint site.

“We also used Groove 2007 for issue tracking,” Paralkar continues. “When we came across an issue that we could not resolve, we couldn’t continue working. We needed answers to these questions as rapidly as possible. With Groove 2007, we posted our queries in the evening and when we returned to work in the morning, the answers would be waiting for us. This was a huge improvement.”

“We used the issue tracker for bidirectional, threaded discussions between the developers and the designers,” Dinovo adds. “We also used the architecture discussion board for unilateral communication from the designers to the developers─announcing changes in direction or posting examples of code, for instance.”

To maintain continuity across the solution, the development team continued to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the repository for all project-level documentation. “We had a specific document strategy for this project,” says Dinovo. “Anything that needed approval or visibility outside of the development team’s sphere would be posted to the solution-level SharePoint site. Everything else was posted to Groove 2007. This gave us the ability to pre-assess development issues before they escalated to the project level and became visible to the entire solution team.”

Benefits

Dinovo notes that using Office Groove 2007 as a collaboration tool with offshore, multisite teams has reduced issue response time from 4 days to 24 hours; improved project management through visible, traceable discussion threads; circumvented network latency issues while increasing project productivity; and created a dynamic model for using Office Groove 2007 in partnership with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Reduced Issue Response Time, Increased Project Productivity

Dinovo notes, “Using the offline capabilities and issue-tracking tools of Office Groove 2007, we can collaborate more effectively with our offshore team in India, reducing issue response time.” 

Taylor adds that a 24-hour turnaround for issue resolution is considered the gold standard for the offshore model Service Level Agreement (SLA). “Using Office Groove 2007, we are able to meet this mark, or at least get very close to it,” he says. “When we used e-mail and Team Foundation Server it took us days to respond, but with Groove 2007 we can communicate with the offshore team and be confident that they’ll receive our messages. This is a lifesaver for us.”

Improved Project Management

Using the threaded-discussion capabilities and issue-tracker tool of Office Groove 2007, Avanade increased the visibility and traceability of queries, issues, and project status updates. “With Office Groove 2007, we are able to trace past conversations and track current discussions, both of which helps us make better management decisions going forward,” says Taylor. “There are no hidden issues, so there are fewer surprises. To me, that’s invaluable.”

Avanade CIO Dale Christian adds, “We’re definitely seeing an organic interest in Office Groove 2007. This is not a central deployment, but people are easily picking it up and using it where it makes sense. As CIO, it feels good to be able to say, ‘Okay, you can use it’ without being concerned that it will run counter to our strategy or trample over our infrastructure. The project teams that are using Groove 2007 love it. It’s a good thing.”   

Enhanced Partnership of Collaboration Tools

When asked how Office Groove 2007 can work together with Office SharePoint Server 2007, Dinovo says, “I see Office Groove 2007 as a flexible, ad hoc communication tool that really complements the robust document collaboration capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Ad hoc sub-teams can use Groove 2007 as a conversational tool between team members, while at the same time using SharePoint Server 2007 as the system of record for project documents.”

Dinovo goes on to note that this initial use of Office Groove 2007 software has sparked tremendous interest within Avanade. “The excitement about Office Groove 2007 has spread up to the executive level within Avanade,” he says. “Based on the success of this project, Avanade is beginning to look for ways to incorporate Groove 2007 into the corporate standard operating procedure for multisite, global collaboration.”

Christian concludes, “I think the primary benefit of Office Groove 2007 is the ability for our very distributed and mobile workforce to quickly create collaborative teams regardless of where they are in the world and have those teams work in a very focused, very intense, and very productive way.”

Improved Project Management Using the threaded-discussion capabilities and issue-tracker tool of Office Groove 2007, Avanade increased the visibility and traceability of queries, issues, and project status updates. “With Office Groove 2007, we are able to trace past conversations and track current discussions, both of which helps us make better management decisions going forward,” says Taylor. “There are no hidden issues, so there are fewer surprises. To me, that’s invaluable.”

Microsoft Office System
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For more information about Avanade products and services, call
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www.avanade.com