COVID-19 and the Indian advantage

Everybody got the ball rolling on work from home (wfh), some faster and better some more slowly. But work from home is just one specific work model of a broader concept.

Work from remote

It is undoubtedly easier to do creative work in a team if the team is in a room. The new reality though is that it will take time until we can do this again on a broad base if ever at all. While less travel on a global scale will have positive effect of the global environment through reduced pollution it is a challenge for most of the business world to get used to. If you follow social media you see quotes from many people that cite their bosses saying something like "Work from home has worked great and thanks for the effort, you are expected back in the office full time from Monday on". It is difficult not to fall back into old habits. It is difficult to have trust to your employees to do the right thing without supervision. Or, is it really?

It is a mind set and cultural change for most enterprises. These changes take time. Even if the whole COVID-19 situation has given us a jump start of these changes it remains an effort to change. This goes hand in hand with topics like measuring employees on outcomes rather than hours, end-to-end accountability rather than task oriented thinking and a product mindset. A lot of that is overlapping with agile concepts and topics like DevOps.

And nonetheless at lot of it is being based on presence. The general idea of a stand-up meeting is coming together physically. Collaboration is being thought of working together in a room. Project teams are brought together in a single location as the hub for the project. The first technology steps to enable an online collaboration are not yet fully established in the culture and I admit I rather download a document, work on it locally and upload my changes again than working online on a document jointly with others.

Instead of exploring the psychology of this I'd like to focus another fact in this post. There is a group of experts, actually a whole industry, that is being used to work from remote. Their whole concept is based on remote collaboration and a result driven approach. It's a whole generation of very clever minds that is used to a remote work model.

Remote work is the basic principle of Indian heritage IT companies

Application development by Indian IT companies has always been founded on the work principle of being remote. While in the past this might have been driven by the expectation of lower cost, nowadays it proves to be a decisive competitive factor for the customers of these players.

• Remote work (even wfh within India) is already the established model
• Delivering result/outcome based contracts is an established practice
• No ramp up time has established customer to drive change in times crisis without delay
• New models, e.g. sourcing full feature teams for a product, rather than single skills is not new to them
• The technical setup, network, security, remote collaboration tools, is well established and follows defined blue prints

The customers working with Indian heritage providers had almost zero impact by the change of working due to COVID-19. The enterprises that leverage this to drive change and innovation will come out on top of their market once the crisis is over or we coped with it to return to a kind of normal. While many companies struggled to keep the lights on in wfh scenarios the customers of Indian heritage companies leapfrogged their markets by driving change that was sluggish before. Introducing cloud, AI, ML, Analytics, transforming legacy applications and creating new business capabilities adopting change (think curbside), all of this and much more is what they increased speed on while business went low. Utilizing the already established remote work excellence enables them to come out on top. While others stopped projects and send IT folks home they grasped the opportunity to make changes to the underlying business foundation in times where business slowed down.

For Indian heritage customers the COVID-19 crisis becomes an opportunity

So if you consider to make use of this opportunity even now and wonder whom you should work with I can encourage you to reach out to the Indian heritage providers and learn how they can drive an advantage for you.

In addition the maturity of these providers is high and many have established hybrid work models with local bridge heads and concepts like the "proxy product owner". Also, there are even innovation hubs outside of India, like Hexaware's mobiquity in the US and Europe.

If you want to know more about working with Indian heritage providers and how they drive diversity (e.g. working as an European in these organizations) and the social difference they make (e.g. Hexaware and Yuva-Unstoppable) feel free to reach out.