It is 9 a.m. Monday morning and Peter Kelly, Managing Director of Academy Information Systems in Trowbridge, UK, has just arrived at his desk. He sits down to examine the progress on the latest release of Academy software for housing benefits. For three years this development has been outsourced to Mastek, an Indian software company. Kelly consults the Mastek website relating to the project and the ‘dashboard’ shows relevant indicators of quality, utilization, efficiency and schedule. Subsequently, he meets Sanjay, Mastek's project manager, who updates him on the progress verbally. Part of Academy's project team has arrived for work six hours before Kelly and has already made progress on several programming specifications given to them the previous evening. This is because the majority of the project team live and work in a different time zone, country and culture at Mastek's India development centre in Mumbai. Around lunchtime in the UK, before the Mumbai part of the project team leaves for home, they transfer the completed code to the server in Academy's Trowbridge office. The UK-based Mastek and Academy staff then have time for testing the completed code before incorporation into the beta release of the application. They can then prepare detailed specifications for the India-based team that they will pick up electronically in the Mumbai morning.