Outsourcing, scheduling, holidays...

Diversity Means Business... Business Means Diversity

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In the modern global 2008 world of business, government, education, and enterprise of any kind, outsourcing and International co-working, collaboration, and cooperation are essential, emerging every-day realities.  

Companies outsource work to other countries in distant parts of the world.  They market internationally.  Other countries have different cultures, and they celebrate different events, and have very different statutory holiday schedules.

One of the implications seldom properly considered is scheduling.  The planning/scheduling impacts of holidays can be huge.  

Just as a simple example, consider an American company that outsources work to organizations in China and Pakistan, and has a substantial amount of sales in Canada.  All of the organizations and stakeholders involved in this global trading arrangement, if they need to work together and collaborate, need to think of the impact of the calendar on scheduling.  Phone calls, meetings... any events that involve co-working in real time need to be carefully planned with due consideration for holidays.

To illustrate the impact, we've created a holiday "mashup" for the countries involved in our hypothetical global trading arrangement - USA, Canada, Pakistan, China - http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pIGLjuEGkGTkQi-PtRA4kRA 

Although no country in our example has more than 10 statutory holidays, there are 31 different schedule alert days in 2008... days on which one or more of the employee populations have statutory time off... holidays.  Collaborative, coordinated events involving all the partners aren't possible on 31 different days of 2008.  And to complicate things further, the events don't always happen on the same dates every year.  The countries use different calendars - some solar; some lunar.  2009 will not be the same as 2008.  It's complicated...