Shield: Product Development in a Distributed Team

Evaluation

One month after the new initiatives came into effect and one day before he was to meet with Mary Bell to present an update, Howard looked through a pile of memos sent by Sun Ho. Unfortunately, the news was not good. According to Sun Ho, the conference calls were not well attended by US team members, and turnaround time from US-based developers back to India continued to be slow. Since Howard’s official announcement encouraging travel between the two sites, many Indians had taken him up on the offer, yet no one from the US site had traveled to India. Worst of all, the US-based developers were complaining about the weekly teleconferences, and continued to insist that they did not want to work with the developers in India. At the same time, the time pressures for project delivery were increasing.
As he thought about his meeting with Mary Bell, Howard wondered what he would say. Had he been wrong about the root causes of the problem? Were there other issues at play here that he had overlooked?