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On April 6th, AmCham held its Software Excellence in China conference, an event designed to provide businesses -- both those that produce software and those that buy it -- with practical strategies. The conference focused on achieving better business results through successful software development and enhanced project management.

Speakers at the conference included Petri Vesterinen of the Nokia Research Center, Qi Chen, Chief Executive Officer of the Shanghai Information Office, Frank Mulligan, Managing Director Technology Industry Recruitment Solutions, KY Chan, General Manager of Hewlett Packard, and Ivar Jacobson, Vice President of Process Strategy Rational Software.

Calculated deliberateness
Bleum CEO Eric Rongley opened the conference with a call to increase competitiveness through "calculated deliberateness and excellence of execution". "China has now shown that it has raw talent," he said. "But this needs to be refined and polished."

Rongley cited statistics indicating that 85 percent of software development projects worldwide fail due to poor management – because they are late, over budget or of poor quality. "The larger the project, the greater the risk of failure," he said. But China, he said, might enjoy a higher rate of software development success because projects here are smaller and executed with small teams.

One important tool in improving management and project success, Rongley said, is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), first developed in 1987 at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) as a tool for the U.S. government to evaluate the performance of software contractors. CMM gives developers a rating, and can help businesses in determining reliable suppliers of software products and services.

Reconciling Developers and Buyers
Irv Beiman, Chairman of E-Gate Infotech, followed up with a discussion of the disparity between goals of software developers and the needs of buyers in the China market. One issue, he said, is the difficulty buyers have in clearly identifying and explaining their software needs, another is that developers often provide late or "buggy" products.

Accurately identifying requirements would help to improve business results, but developers and buyers still operate under conflicting sets of priorities. "Developers are interested in the technology, whereas buyers are interested in the business solution," he said. "Developers are motivated to deliver less for more -- buyers are motivated to buy more for less."

Project Management
Petri Vesterinen stressed the need for good project management in improving software development results, and provided figures indicating that only five percent of projects are completed within the original budget. Schedule overruns are a major problem, with about 30 percent of projects going over the pre-designated schedule by 50 percent, and 35 percent having a more than 100 percent overrun. What is worse, nearly 15 percent of software projects do not achieve any meaningful result for their buyers. "Estimation is an essential but neglected part of project management," he said.

India as a model for success
KY Chan then introduced Hewlett Packard's China Software Solutions Center, recently set up in Shanghai with a total expect staff of 1,500. At this top CMM level of operations, HP hopes to transplant its success in India to China. "We are using India as a mentor in building this center. At the beginning, we will have a lot of Indian engineers in China to get us up to speed," he said.

Lower cost for components will mean that more and more software companies do projects in China, Chan said. Component prices in California, for example, are about four times those in China. Strong government support, high quality IT professionals, excellent infrastructure, reasonable costs and a large and rapidly expanding local market are also big draws.

Tech Talent Pool in China - Forged in a Different Fire
Recruitment, retention and motivation are also important issues related to success in software development in China. Frank Mulligan said that the career goals of technical staff are strikingly different from those of non-technical staff with technology professionals chasing technology, not career paths.

"A 'techie' aspires to 'Guru Status' and peer respect. A techie's career path relies on tech exposure, they want to be on a team developing the latest project and afterwards they want to be able to tell people. A techie's resume often looks very different as they hop from project to project with short very intense periods of employment with each company."

Differences can also be seen between technical staff in China and the West, he said. Westerners tend take a sequential approach -- A to B to C to D -- while CHINESE people are more synchronic, and more flexible even while focusing on the objective. "You can see this in any bank in China. A clerk may be in the middle of serving you and switch to somebody else as they come along. Flexibility is the key in this type of approach."

Universalistic, non-synchronic cultures have been the most successful at developing software, said Mulligan. India, however, is an interesting case, having achieved remarkable successes in software development despite its more synchronic frame of mind. "That is the model that I see for China."

About Bleum
Founded in 2001, Bleum is one of China's leading outsourcing providers to American and European companies in a variety of sectors including high-tech, financial services, telecommunications, and retail. The company specializes in creating global development centers, providing services such as application development, support & maintenance, testing and legacy system modernization. American owned and managed, Bleum understands the language, business culture, and expectations of western-based IT organizations. From its industry-leading English curriculum and pursuit of the best talent in China to its relentless focus on quality and prestigious ISO27001 and CMM Level 5 certifications, IT outsourcing with Bleum is smart, transparent and extraordinarily effective. For more information, visit www.bleum.com.

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