Apart from group meetings and huddles, try to engage with them one-on-one, just like a regular employee. Collaborating with offshore teams means you’re most likely to work across vastly different time zones. The roadmap establishes your product’s development process for the offshore teams. Furthermore, you can divide the development process into brief iterations called sprints. This iteration will help you and your team constantly track the progress and swiftly make changes to align with the roadmap’s direction. What if you encounter a sudden influx of work and you’re too understaffed or don’t have enough office resources to take them up?

You are not required to spend money on office space, IT infrastructure and utilities such as electricity. If the company wants to build a modern software product, comparable with Facebook or other popular internet services, it is crucial to prepare solid and informative documentation. It will not only serve the developers themselves but also help future team onshore software development members to tackle the technical debt and solve problems no one ever thought about when writing the code. Software development is a challenging venture, with products composed of thousands of lines of code. With changing people working on a particular part of the product, switching teams, and multiple reviewers, it is no surprise that the code gets swampy.

Exploring options within a global talent pool

Communicating workflows and deadlines helps to set clear expectations. Make sure everyone is aware of their and other team members’ roles because you likely have staff stationed in various locations. Teams can communicate more easily by setting up a shared group calendar where everyone can list their daily tasks.

Additionally, consider scheduling check-ins or daily Scrum meetings to stay updated on your project’s progress. Clear communication should start during onboarding and continue throughout the employment of a remote developer or any other remote employee. Agile methodology helps improve employee engagement and build a productive and dedicated team. The calendar feature provides a summary of tasks and projects for effective scheduling. Various sorts of a process for different sectors, from software development to customer care, are included in a template collection. It enables team members to plan their workdays by knowing who will be working on what.

Reduce the ‘distance’ of offshore teams

If you work with offshore developers, you won’t have to spend capital on expenses such as insurance payments, employee payrolls, office rent, vacation, software licenses, recruitment costs, etc. Instead, you will be spending on the most vital area, the creation of your MVP . To ensure your success with offshore teams, you need to break your project into specific requirements and project milestones. Understanding a customer’s schedule, project gates, and key performance indicators should be prioritized.

You can simply hire an offshore team and not worry about the sufficient capacity to undertake new projects. As discussed before, hiring offshore teams can help you be an agile company to remain competitive. This is because of your immense flexibility when working with such teams.

Automatize the Processes

If the progress tracking cannot be done regularly, offshore team members may fail to meet the pre-determined deadlines and standards. Moreover, the quality and uniformity of outputs may suffer and severally damage the company branding. https://globalcloudteam.com/ In fact, managing an offshore team is not as straightforward as overseeing an internal team. When dealing with an offshore partner, it is not possible to simply walk over and monitor them the same way you could in a physical office.

Your offshore team—if you want them truly integrated—needs the same treatment. It has a way of easing the tension with work and building better bonding and collaboration among team members. Keep communication open, encourage questions, and confirm understanding before everyone gets their foot on their various remote gas pedals. More specifically, engage your team in the process—create a wireframe to illustrate the product design process. Doing this gives a clearer picture of the product, what functions it should have, and what problems the product will solve. You need clear communication, focused dedication, collaborative teamwork, and more.

Best practices for managing an offshore development team

An offshore development team will help you focus on your core business activities by taking responsibility for your technology requirements. They help your in-house team concentrate on the big picture stuff that requires your complete attention like business strategy, goals, growth plan, etc. Also, you have the flexibility of increasing and decreasing the size of your team based on your requirements. Feedback is an important part of any management process, especially when it comes to an offshore software company.

• For example, a company may agree with a service provider for software development professionals to form a dedicated offshore development team.
• Paying in-house employees for night shifts can be quite expensive, and work still needs to be done.
• This makes it easier for the potential offshore staff to understand the prospects and expectations of the working relationship.
• If this is costly, setting a schedule or feedback system would also continuously improve the quality of outputs.
• Both involve tedious documentation, legal procedures, and massive time consumption, which are incredibly unrewarding when you want to scale your staff for a short-term requirement.

In addition, proper standards may not have yet to be set or communicated. If this continues, everyone will carry out their tasks in ways not approved by the company. The quality and uniformity of outputs may suffer and affect the company branding. Security – Getting the agreements signed will ensure the security of the project. Providing written documents on the processes will ensure transparency and accountability. Working with an offshore team can be highly beneficial for your business.

How to Manage Developers as If They Were Your Employees

Another way to have or increase overlapping hours, is to change shift timings of the offshore or in-house team, or of both teams. If you think in the other way, time-zone differences provide an advantage of continuous productivity, i.e. when your team in the US is sleeping, work is still going on in India. When working with your in-house team, you can communicate very easily and frequently by initiating face-to-face talk whenever you require. With offshore teams, you should communicate even more frequently so that all the things are clear and there is no confusion despite large distance between your in-house and offshore team. Outsourcing to an offshore team allows you to hire expert professionals for a fraction of the price that you would have to pay if you would hire full-time in-house employees. Besides the salaries of the employees, you save on other expenditures such as national insurance contributions, health insurance, sick pay, bonuses and other employee benefits.