"It's a critical job since the project entirely rests on the shoulders of the project manager," said published authority Erran Carmel, Professor of the Information Technology Department, American University, Washington DC. "Global project managers are more than managers of projects; they serve as a necessary bridge between cultures," added Carmel. "Complex projects of an international nature always require a certain amount of ‘human glue’ to put them together and to keep them together."
The Dallas Morning News story featured Shishir Madhugiri, a senior project manager for Cyber Group Inc., who has a job most people never dreamed of a decade ago.
"Technology of today is what makes my job and our form of off-shoring in general possible," said Madhugiri. "For example, Cyber Group's software developers can post their daily work on a company web site, which allows our software developers in Dallas and Delhi, our project managers, and our customers to easily access and review the work in near real time."
As a cultural and technical link between Cyber Group's U.S. customers and their software engineers and developers in India, Madhugiri carefully balances his responsibilities as a project manager and cultural liaison to ensure that each software project succeeds as envisioned.
"Even though we all speak English, sometimes it is simply a question of translating a simple concept from one cultural perspective to another," says Madhugiri. "It is our professional opinion, based on many years of experience, that as long as you maintain strict engineering standards, it does not matter in which country the work is done. In the end, the product is only as good as the standards that were used to create it."
Cyber Group's project managers communicate by email and phone several times throughout each day with the company's managers and software engineers in Delhi, usually to discuss strategies or clarify questions. In cases where software bugs must be fixed immediately, the Delhi team may work around the clock. Cyber also invests in their international resources by bringing their Indian engineers and managers to Dallas several times each year to undergo training and to meet face-to-face with clients.
John Pillow, Cyber Group's vice president of software engineering services, stresses that companies must make two decisions – one, deciding to outsource and two, deciding to offshore their outsourcing. Where they usually run into problems is when they simply hand a project over to an offshore company without maintaining project oversight from the U.S.
"Mr. Madhugiri and our other U.S. project managers are like quarterbacks,"
Cyber Group, Inc. partners with customers to maintain, reengineer and enhance their customers’ software products, and to engineer their embedded electronic control systems and products. Their proven process significantly reduces their customers’ time and cost to market. It offers their customers a comprehensive, tightly coupled set of life-cycle software and system engineering services, i.e. services to engineer their control electronics and to maintain, reengineer, support and enhance their software products and systems through all phases of their product life-cycles. Coupling of the resources in India with those in Dallas enables Cyber Group to deliver a "virtual 24-hour day". Additional information can be found at www.cybergroupusa.com, 469-916-7730 x 309.
