Shield: Product Development in a Distributed Team

Executive Summary

Shield is a suite of software components that provides an end-to-end solution for the tracking and protection of digital property rights, either over the Internet or within a corporate intranet. It enables content owners to attach rights and conditions to digital content such as documents or music files. It enforces those rights during distribution, and tracks usage and royalties. Its main technological strengths are a language for expressing digital rights and a security component. The language for expressing digital rights was patented, and licensed for free so that it could become the industry standard. The firm considers these technologies essential for

maintaining its leadership position, given the rapid change from a paper-based to a digital- based industry.

The architecture and the initial prototype were developed in 1996 in the firm’s Los Angeles research center. From the research stage, at the end of 1996, the development of Shield was undertaken by two groups. The Los Angeles group worked on the most technologically advanced module: the one on which patents were sought and obtained. At the same time, the other three modules were assigned to Professional, an Indian company located in Bangalore, specializing in providing outsourcing services to Western clients.
A project lead in Bangalore was responsible for the Indian group and its deliverables. A second manager of Indian origin, Randan Banerjee, was responsible for the US-Indian relationship from the US side. Randan was Anil’s deputy manager, and his main responsibility was the relationship with the India-based developers (hiring, training and ensuring smooth coordination).
The overall management of the team resided in the US. At the beginning of the project, Anil and Randan (particularly Randan) spent significant amounts of time at the Indian site, sometimes weeks and even months at a time, hiring and training and coordinating across the two groups. Their goal was to lessen the effects of geographic distance, to communicate and to act as a bridge between the two groups. To that end, some of the Indian developers came to the US for architecture discussions, and many of them spent time in the US to help with the integration of the code being developed in India.
Between 1996 and the end of 1999, 90% of Shield’s development took place in India, where there were around 60 developers working on the project. The Indian group was responsible for part of the architecture design, the entire detailed design and the coding of the three modules they owned.¹ The first successful Shield prototype was developed in India. In August 1999, a manager from the Los Angeles team and an Indian developer presented the prototype at the Seybold industry fair.
Following the successful prototype presentation, several customers, such as publishing houses, started to become interested in digital property rights management and began working with the team in order to develop it further. This coincided with the departure of Anil, then Randan. As a result, senior management decided to hire several engineers at the US site to have product development continue in the absence of the reliable link with the Indian team, at a time when the market for digital property rights was maturing.