Running delivery across Dubai and Islamabad

GoDesign FZE holds the licence and the client relationships from the UAE. GoDesign Technologies LLP in DHA Phase 2, Islamabad is where most of the building happens. Islamabad runs one hour ahead of Gulf Standard Time, so the two working days overlap for most of their length, and delivery is built around that overlap rather than around handover documents.

A normal week

Every engagement has one named project manager holding the client thread. That is not an admin role here: it means one person is accountable for scope, dates and the honesty of the status, rather than the client coordinating a designer, two developers and an automation engineer themselves.

• Mornings in Islamabad are for build work, before the Dubai day is fully underway.
• The overlap hours carry the calls, the reviews and anything that needs a decision.
• Anything decided on a call is written down the same day, because a decision nobody recorded gets relitigated in a fortnight.

What goes wrong

Scope moves. Clients go quiet at the exact point a decision is needed. A build slips because a third-party integration behaves differently in production than it did in staging. None of that is unusual, and a process that pretends otherwise is a process that hides it until the deadline.

What we hold ourselves to is that the client hears about a slipping date from us first, with the revised date attached, rather than discovering it on the day. That single habit accounts for most of the difference between a project that recovers and one that ends badly.

What makes it work

Written process for the recurring work, an SOP for anything done more than twice, and a scope written down before the build starts. Clients across the US, Europe and the Middle East mean three sets of working hours and three sets of expectations about response time, and none of that survives being held in one person's head.