I feel like sharing experience of being a project manager in an international outsourcing company! We have been dealing with projects of all kinds for many years already and know how to overcome cultural barriers and long distances.

It is a common opinion that there is a significant difference between IT projects depending on where the client is located. It appears that it does matter. The common types of challenges are:
● Timezone ● Language ● Legal

While timezone challenge is actually sometimes a plus as you can set up literally 24/7 environment when team is located on the opposite side of “Flat world” — language & legal challenges is something to consider when thinking about workflow in the project. For example, if a client wants to be communicating with developers directly — it’s extremely important that you have a layer of management accurately but noticeably built into the team to amortize the pressure developers may feel. On the legal side it’s less important when you’re startup, however it can grow significantly challenging when you think enterprise-wise and consider being HIPPA compliant, following GDPR or even considering going local with Internet services & even re-locating the team to ensure data protection. That is becoming the even more important thing in the project than before.

Another thing to mention here— even if described above common challenges aren’t about your project, a lot depends on the management style in the project. Even if you’re located next - doors with your client which is for sure beneficial - this does not necessarily mean that life of an outsorce project manager is becoming easier.

Let’s try to think of some examples where it becomes bad news even though it’s good news from the first impression:
● Communication ● Maturity ● Financing

We love when our clients communicate with teams directly, especially we value communication on the executive level in b2b projects. However, it’s very important for an executive to delegate management to a professional PM. If that doesn’t happen, that heavy weight of businessman can get into the way, especially if it’s not limited by the timezone overlap windows. Imagine in the days of instant messenger driven world where people even turn to bots when ordering food — similar behaviour can be expected in management of projects.

The solution is simple — just use similar methodologies like always, Scrum, Kanban. Try avoiding chatting all day long and discuss specific time windows for communication. Also important to copy/record important communication from “all day long communication” to synch the rest of the team who isn’t following the chat conversation.

Sometimes it’s not possible and this is where overall maturity of the client side comes into the way. This is exactly where clients who are looking for vendors locally only differ from the ones who think globally. That usually means that the business is very limited geographically and therefore can be less mature than the projects with wider auditory. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just challenge to consider. If it’s the case — strongly recommended to do some coaching and make sure it’s a very stress-resistant management workflow setup, with necessary limitations and rules of communication. Where for example technical specialists don’t get to communicate with the business.
Finally the financing of companies that aren’t going global yet is usually also different and frequently not too well organized.

So just know the all sides of different companies and love your clients, who actually are very similar across the world where professionals already do collaborate without the geographical limitations!