Communication Is an Essential Part

Communication is an essential part of any formal group and I realized this during my internship at a software company. It was a complete new experience for me to work with a diverse group of people. My team consisted of people from the U.S., India, Philippines and Singapore. We were a group of 20 people, out of which 3 of us were from the U.S., 8 from India, 6 from Philippines and 3 from Singapore. The roles of each of the member was distinct.

While my colleague and I were trainees, the other person from the U.S. was the manager of the team. The colleagues from India were software developers while those from the Philippines were testers. The 3 people from Singapore provided administration and systems support. The aim of this group was to create a software for a banking company in the U.S. The software would automate their process of bill payment and will make it easy for customers to transfer money between their different accounts, besides managing the accounts.

This software also took into consideration the security aspects of online banking. The deadline for this project was four months. The major chunk of development was done by my colleagues in India and every module was tested by my Philippines colleagues. My role was to understand the complexities involved in the whole process and do an internal audit for the team. This broad role helped me to interact with all these people from different countries and it gave me a whole new perspective about communication and corporate atmosphere.

Developmental stages Each stage of development produced its own challenges. The first stage started with requirements gathering and in this stage there was an interaction with the client to get all the specifications required. During this meeting, my manager, three developers and I were present. This phase brought to light the communicating ability of the three developers because they had to talk to the client about the feasibility of including and excluding certain features and the same had to be communicated to the rest of the team.

This was more challenging than what I thought because the communication had to be precise and effective, without any distortions for the software to have the required features. The next stage was development of small modules and its parallel testing. This brought about a different kind of problem. The Indians and Philippines lived in different time zones and so they had to agree at a common time to discuss the issues that came up during development.

This reflected their ability to communicate, be flexible and responsive to the ideas of others. After the development was completed, the testing team took over completely and did an aggressive testing to identify any defects. These were sent back to the development team for modifications. Finally, the product was completed. Through these stages, the support team from Singapore ensured that the back-up system and the network lines were always functional and my manager from the U.S. managed the entire team.

Problem During the course of product development, the client decided that they needed an additional feature that was not discussed earlier. This was told to the team at a later stage and it became difficult for the developers to make that change. While the manager decided that the software should include the feature, the developers opposed this idea as this would require extensive changes in the code and the product may not be delivered on time.

The testing team also felt the same way because it would put more pressure on them and this can result in the oversight of a few defects. The support team from Singapore felt that the change should be included to comply with the client's request. This became a major roadblock for the project with opposing views on the problem. Finally, the manager spoke to the client and explained the situation.

They agreed to extend the due date by a couple of months and the developers and testers felt that time was good enough to make the changes. So, communication helped to clear this stand-off between the team members. Leadership style of the manager The manager followed a democratic style of leadership.

According to Daft (2007, p.44), "A democratic leader delegates authority to others, encourages participation, relies on subordinates' knowledge for completion of tasks, and depends on subordinate respect for influence." This is the exact approach that was followed by my manager and it proved to be effective. He could manage the entire project and could communicate easily with those located in different parts of the world. Such a style of leadership was comfortable for all the team members because they felt they were the experts in their assigned role.

An autocratic style would have failed because it would impose too much authority on these people who felt they know their job best. Also, the roles were clearly defined and such a style would have disintegrated the team. On the other hand, a free style of leadership would have given too much authority to the team members and this would have proved chaotic, given the different timezones, cultures and location.

Using this style, he was able to get the opinions of team members and discuss it with the client o find an amicable solution. In my opinion, this is the best solution for this problem. Team The team was a diverse group of individuals who came together to create a software for a banking client. It proved to be successful as the software was accepted by the client and its millions of customers use it today for their banking needs.

This common purpose was achieved easily through effective communication, clear distinction of roles and the ability of people to work in diverse groups. The different groups of people came from different cultures and they had a different accent, though.