In these types of situations follow the sun will be highly inefficient given the amount of communication required with remote teams. Using Follow the Sun Model in Customer Service. Follow the Sun can be traced back to the mid-1990s where IBM had the first global software team which was specifically set up to take advantages of FTS. support daily handoffs. From the inside out, the solar interior consists of: the core (the central region where nuclear reactions consume hydrogen to form helium. Proceedings (pp. They called it standard time. Also, several large countries (Russia, China) officially use only one time zone, so all the clocks in that country keep the same time. This way you don’t have to worry about any customer problem being mistakenly ignored. [1] Management tools can be used to estimate and plan schedules, manage sprints and track progress. The follow the sun model offers a better alternative in the form of lower cost, happier work culture and an energized, fresh team that can care for your customers. Carmel, E., Espinosa, J. using agile software development or the waterfall model. Kroll, J., Hashmi, S. I., Richardson, I., & Audy, J. L. (2013, August). https://nearshoreamericas.com/time-zones-developing-dilemma-farshore A systematic literature review of best practices and challenges in follow-the-sun software development. FTS was successful for this team. With challenges like collaboration and communication complicating the ‘Follow the Sun’ model, a ticketing system like Freshdesk can make it easy for teams sitting in different locations to stay on the same page. Follow. Information and Software Technology, 48(1), 1-11. ... As a result, people on the eastern side of a time zone, where the sun sets earlier, tend to go to bed earlier than those on the western side. : Having your customer service team members spread across different locations with staggered time zones is one of the most important principles of Follow the Sun model. This happened three (3) times a … Yap, M. (2005, July). Global knowledge work is defined as geographically dispersed knowledge workers working collaboratively from multiple locations. Here are some features that make Freshdesk a great fit for global customer service: If you need another agent to take over an issue currently owned by someone else or you need help from another team it can be difficult and time-consuming to explain the details of the problem. Additionally, technologies like conference video, emails and telephone calls are easy to implement and allow companies to perform synchronous and asynchronous communication between teams and works well in an agile environment. Reporter. But if you need to develop a global support team and are willing to make the initial investment follow the sun model can be an extremely lean and effective way of running your support. Recent studies on FTS have moved to mathematical modeling of FTS. Freshdesk has an integration called Freshconnect that makes sharing context really simple. Kroll et al. Having your customer service team members spread across different locations with staggered time In Tibet, for example, the Sun rises while the clocks (which keep Beijing time) say it is midmorning already. When your teams are sitting time zones apart that job gets slightly more complicated. Now, these agents and teams might not necessarily sit in the same location as the person currently handling the issue. Using simulation to evaluate global software development task allocation strategies. Agents work in different locations whose time zones follow each other. This might be because your agent lacks the required experience or you are dealing with a technical issue that has to involve someone from the software team. Identified best practices are the use of agile methods and using technologies to develop FTS activities. There are even a few instances of counties split into two time zones. People constantly switching work hours also takes a toll on their health and you have to pay extra in the form of special allowances and perks to compensate these, need to take care of safety for night time commutes, and more. The idea behind the ‘Follow the Sun’ model involved software development teams, sitting across different worldwide locations, working on the same project. Reducing Time-To-Market Using Follow-the-Sun Techniques", "Sunshine 24/7: As EDS' work stops in one time zone, it picks up in another", "Following the sun: case studies in global software development", "Global call centre network slashes costs at Barclays", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Follow-the-sun&oldid=991563061, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, The main objective is the reduction of development duration /. So conveying context becomes a challenge. Then, if you want another easy way to know what time it is everywhere your team's located, you can turn on the World clock in the Calendar Labs settings. Its distributed workflow is more complex to implement due to cultural and technical differences as well as the differences in time making coordination and communication challenging. elicit cooperation and collaboration. for companies that are catering to a global customer base. This is carried out using handoffs where all pending tasks are handed over to another location before the shift in the first location ends. In addition, team members in the Beijing office start at 7am, 9am, 1pm, and 2pm CST (China Standard Time). Introduction. In the third scenario, the team was present spread across the US and India which was also a failure because of communication problems and time zone issues. World Time Zones. This way work is carried out 24/7 with task handoffs taking place between each of these global teams after the shift of a particular location ends. FTS has the potential to significantly increase the total development time per day (as viewed from the perspective of a single time zone): with two sites the development time can increase to up to 16 hours, or up to 24 hours if there are three sites, reducing the development duration by as much as 67%. Global software development (GSD) is now the need of the hour more than ever. But if you are a growing organization then you have to ask yourselves a few more questions: 1) Do you have a big enough customer service team to follow the sun? The table below shows position of the the Sun compared to the time and date … So if a ticket is halfway to resolution but the agent handling it is nearing the end of their shift, he/she has to make sure that the information is transferred to an available agent in the next location. The thick yellow line shows where sunset and sunrise are currently occurring. Team boundary issues across multiple global firms. Time.is automatically displays the time in your time zone by using your IP address to detect your location. You can set your own time zone, and save the time zones you work with most to have an easy way to switch between them. The follow the sun model approach is one such example and in this article, you will read about the following. Time zones often follow the boundaries of a country and its subdivisions since it is convenient for places in close proximity to observe the same time. Follow the sun: distributed extreme programming development. This manual work can be completely avoided by using Freshdesk to categorize agents into groups and assign them certain skills. Modern day software development is spread more and more across national and international boundaries. The next production site is several time zones west. [2] In particular, Carmel et al. If you need a third time zone, just follow the same steps, and place a checkmark next to the Show a third time zone. For example, if you have teams sitting out of both the US and the UK, you can create groups within Freshdesk that assign tickets based on the time zone of the agents. Follow the sun helps teams resolve queries with speed and efficiency. In order to accommodate people inconvenienced by the time zone change, shops and restaurants in … Agents work in different locations whose time zones follow each other. Agile methodologies emphasize communication. These can work well in follow the sun because handoffs are minimum and most queries can be solved by the person answering in the same shift. However, this driver of reducing the resource cost is not the driver of FTS. For instance, if your product or service is high tech queries might be complex, long and require engineering time to solve bugs. Most timezones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offset from UTC or GMT. The length of time it takes the Earth to go around the sun once is 365 days, which we call one year. Time zones on land are usually offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). They do it by starting a team in Colorado at 8am (MST). You can also create a calendar for your own location by entering the latitude, longitude and time zone information. Some companies go with the more traditional application of follow the sun: which means providing anytime, anywhere, 24/7/365 support. The country’s time zone puts it an hour ahead of the UK despite being on the same longitude ‘The immediate consequence is that in the western part of the time zone the sun … 64-68). Now tickets get assigned and routed automatically based on preset criteria. Jalote, P., & Jain, G. (2006). While this is possible with a shift-based system in a single location, the cost of hiring and managing multiple teams on a shift rotation can be extremely difficult. #3 Knowledge Sharing through handoffs: For global support to be a success, there should be no information loss between teams sitting in different locations. Earth is split up into a number of timezones. With incomparable time-telling precision, World Clock is the perfect point of reference for travelers and business people alike. Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, 1(2), 122-141. Production sites are many time zones apart. If you already have a large number of people working for your company with multiple offices across the globe then follow the sun should work for you. Carmel, E. (1999). Loss of communication richness / face-to-face communication, This page was last edited on 30 November 2020, at 18:39. They specifically emphasize face-to-face communication, which can be done within one site. When your home on planet Earth is facing the sun, it is daytime. Since your agents are available 24/7, you are always on top of your ticket queues and customers have shorter wait times for their issues to be resolved regardless of when and where the ticket is raised. The list includes U.S., Canadian and major world cites. Select a major world city to make your free printable Sunrise Sunset Calendar. ... One universal time, combined with local work time connected with the sun … Here’s where a feature like shared ownership comes into play. Having global support only makes sense if you have a global customer base. Follow the Sun (FTS), a sub-field of globally distributed software engineering (GDSE), is a type of global knowledge workflow designed in order to reduce the time to market, in which the knowledge product is owned and advanced by a production site in one time zone and handed off at the end of their work day to the next production site that is several time zones west to continue that work. Time zone boundaries can be legislated at the state and/or county level and … On the other hand, if you are a software company with customers spread out evenly across several locations then follow the sun model would make sense because it means your support will be available at all times regardless of where the customer is based out of. For large retail/consumer businesses, queries are solvable in real-time because they are as simple as ‘What’s my balance’ or ‘Can you help me with a refund/exchange’, etc. While Follow the sun model sounds very solid on paper, it can be difficult to implement because of having different locations. This way both agents will have visibility into the issue and the first agent will still be able to track its progress. [8][9][10][11][12] The research is focused on the issue of speed and the issues around the handoffs. In this case FTS was unsuccessful because of miscommunication, time zone issues and cultural differences. This configuration focuses on making shifts fully optimize expensive resources that could not produce more by increasing the number of employees per shift. WorldClock.com provides accurate world time, statistics and weather in major cities across the world. People constantly switching work hours also takes a toll on their health and you have to pay extra in the form of special allowances and perks to compensate these, need to take care of safety for night time commutes, and more. With challenges like collaboration and communication complicating the ‘Follow the Sun’ model, a ticketing system like Freshdesk can make it easy for teams sitting in different locations to stay on the same page. Based on the type of customers you serve, follow the sun might or might not suit your particular customer service needs. For example, our customer and partner Zuora offers 24/7/365 support coverage. However, in the United States, the borders were usually drawn to follow state lines, or natural landmarks and county lines. Unfortunately, in this case FTS was unsuccessful because it was uncommon to hand off the software artifacts daily. Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 12(5), 491-503. Taweel, A., & Brereton, P. (2006). The type of customer service you offer can differ based on the industry you are in. Modeling coordination costs due to time separation in global software teams. IEEE. Agile supports daily handoffs which is a critical challenge in FTS. OOPS! Find Solar Noon information at accurately for Lahore or any location with automatic Daylight saving time / Summer Time and time zones adjustment in sun times Espinosa, J. One of the important concepts evolved in the past decade or so is the “Follow the sun” (FTS) software development. The logistics are hard as well. In System Sciences, 2009. Ticket assignment can become complicated and many rules have to be created to ensure that no customer issue is neglected. (2013) have researched papers published between 1990 and 2012 and found 36 best practices and 17 challenges for FTS. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. This way you can solve the problem on the go and give updates in real-time to the customer. The second team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in India. The logistics are hard as well. Suppose you have a product or service where you have to provide round-the-clock support for different time zones. Essentially, each team would hand off work at the end of their workday, to another team who is starting their day on the other side of the world. This might be because your agent lacks the required experience or you are dealing with a technical issue that has to involve someone from the software team. Sun-Times Media A City Council committee agreed Monday to expand protections for hospital quiet zones after softening language that would have chipped away at aldermanic prerogative. Following the sun: Case studies in global software development. (2010). " Scroll down and locate the Time Zones section. It's a simple, text-based world clock provides an at-a-glance update. Day and Night. A related concept is follow-the-moon, which is scheduling work to be performed specifically during local night-time hours for reasons such as saving on datacenter costs by using cheaper night-time electricity[14] or spare processing power. IBM was one of the first to try out follow the sun model. Because the Sun’s light moves across the Earth at a rate of 15° longitude per hour, people divided the Earth into 24 roughly equal sections of about 15° each, and assigned a one-hour time difference to each successive zone. Assigning tasks in a 24-h software development model. Follow the sun software development: New perspectives, conceptual foundation, and exploratory field study. It is of great importance to select and adapt a methodology for the daily handoffs[1][13] e.g. Setamanit, S. O., Wakeland, W., & Raffo, D. (2007). [3] The first team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in Australia. So conveying context becomes a challenge. Your IP address is 207.46.13.4. But if most of your customers are concentrated in a couple of countries or time zones then a singular customer support location catered to those time zones will be enough. HICSS'09. Select the time zone you need from the Time zone list and create a label (not necessary). Sundials were still considered to tell the ‘right’ time up until the mid-1600s. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 2) Do you have a high ticket volume during non-peak hours that requires you to hire more full-time personnel? Here are some features that make Freshdesk a great fit for global customer service: Sometimes you need more than one person working on a ticket to get it resolved. The Time Zone rules have been researched using the IANA time zone tables, Wikipedia, newspaper or other published articles on the internet, or information from the country or city’s website.While there are many more zones defined in the IANA tables, use only the Times Zones listed on this page. This is the best way to maintain continuity of support and is available to customers across any location. In the late 1800s, a group of scientists came up with a new system for time zones. FTS is based on the following four principles: An important step in defining FTS is to disambiguate it from other globally distributed configurations to clearly state what FTS is not. While this is possible with a shift-based system in a single location, the cost of hiring and managing multiple teams on a shift rotation can be extremely difficult. It means there needs to be someone available to help customers 24/7 and not just during peak business hours. You have to hire people in night shifts which can be demotivating. If one agent needs to perform a handover because the ticket is still pending and their shift is about to end, he can share the ownership of that ticket with another agent, sitting in the next location whose shift is about to start. There is always one and only one site that owns and works on the project. It is not commonly practiced in industry and has few documented cases where it is applied successfully. [3], There are few documented cases of companies successfully applying FTS. To dive a little deeper into understanding how ‘Follow the Sun’ model works and how you extract its benefits we have to look at the principles it has been built on: #1 24/7 availability across multiple time-zones: Having your customer service team members spread across different locations with staggered time zones is one of the most important principles of Follow the Sun model. A time zone is an area that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and … 18-23). [13] The challenges were grouped in three categories: coordination, communication and culture. 24-hour manufacturing. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself before deciding to go ahead with this approach: #1 What is the nature of your customer service? Copyright © Freshworks Inc. All Rights Reserved. If there are customers using your product or service in several locations across various time zones, then it makes a lot of sense to cover your bases and have your support team ‘follow the sun’. This is the best way to maintain continuity of support and is available to customers across any location. Worldwide times for sunrise, sunset, eclipses of the Sun and Moon, moon phases, moonrise & moonset, equinoxes, solstices. On the ticket itself, you can open up a chat and invite any other agent or team personnel to view the ticket history and understand the context of the issue. With an approach like Follow the sun, it can get very difficult to manage agents who are in different locations. Hovering the mouse over any location on the map will show the map will show the altitude of the Sun as seen from that location. The map above shows where on Earth it is currently day time, night time, or twilight. [3] Some companies have claimed to successfully implement FTS but these companies did not practice the daily handoffs. Most companies tend to lean towards the traditional model of, How Freshdesk can help you implement Follow the Sun. 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Espinosa, a: follow the sun model needs to be created to ensure that customer... Information and software Technology, 48 ( 1 ), 773-783 group of scientists up... Which worked out really well New York, United States and a site in the States. 48 ( 1 ), 17-38 why FTS is difficult to implement because of having different locations more collaboration cooperation. New York, United States, 79 ( 7 ), 2013 IEEE 8th International Conference software... Location or a team that sits remotely across locations will you be able to train them?... Customer problem being mistakenly ignored timezones are exactly one hour apart, 9am! Because it was uncommon to hand off the software artifacts daily however, this emphasis is especially useful facing... Practice, 12 ( 5 ), 17-38 list and create a Calendar for your location!