15^th Aug 2022

Concern #8: Culture Gap between Client and Service Provider

Sometimes clients are reluctant to outsource their projects to other countries due to cultural differences. Their fear is that people from different cultures will not be able to work together and communicate efficiently.

This concern is closely related to the Concern #1: The Language and Communication Barrier we discussed earlier. In fact, worries over a language barrier are part of the culture gap concern. Sometimes, cultural differences not only reflect different languages, but also different human behaviours.

A modern IT industry is comprised of a great number of highly educated engineers, spread across the globe. These IT professionals worldwide share a common IT culture and languages — be it SCRUM, JavaScript, or SOA — with English as lingua franca. Many practices in IT industry are formalized and globalized, and are known to every educated and experienced IT professional. If your team knows these practices and follows them, the cultural gap between it and the rest of the IT world basically disappears.

Such shared IT culture enables programmers from different countries to communicate and collaborate, remotely or in the office. Numerous projects today are successfully completed by distributed teams of IT specialists from multiple countries. COVID-19 acted as a catalyst for expanding remote work, involving specialists from different locations.

It’s worth mentioning that IT professionals are generally very mobile. They easily move between countries, and they can work from any place with an Internet connection and a power outlet. This high mobility also bridges culture gaps in the IT community.

As a result, the cultural aspect may matter only minimally. An example would be a well-tuned R&D team developing an emerging technology via intensive brainstorming and feeding off each other’s ideas. However, such projects are very infrequent among software development projects in general.

So, usually, you shouldn’t worry about the problem of cultural differences if you have a team of proven IT professionals and base your project on standard development models and practices. At the same time, be sure that you evaluate your potential engineers for soft skills, not just for required hard skills. Build your team to share common values and the commitment to a project’s success and assure psychological compatibility between your team members. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up with separate independent IT professionals, rather than a solid team with common goals.

Choose Solead, and you won’t have to worry about the cultural gap because:

• We try to integrate each of our teams into the client’s environment as much as possible to achieve seamless interaction between the client’s engineers and Solead engineers
• When possible, we encourage our engineers to travel to the client’s setting to maintain personal relationships, and we invite our clients to visit Solead
• We start every new project with a small team and grow it step-by-step to adjust our work processes to the client’s unique environment and practices
• All Solead engineers have a BSc, MSc, or a PhD in computer science or a related discipline, and are well educated in common IT practices
• We have a European worldview, which is why we share the same work values as our clients from Western Europe and North America.

In our next post we'll discuss another typical concern related to distant work and time zone difference. Please come back to us soon.