In recent years, outsourcing and remote hiring have emerged as major phenomena in the programming industry. The trend became a necessity with the ongoing market settings, and it appears to be staying here for a while. Even now, over 4.3 million people in the US work remotely half the time.
Other than trust concerns, there is not an abundance of reasons as to why you should not hire a remote development team. It can be cost-saving, productive, efficient, and spares you the time to focus on additional business areas.
Remote working can enhance your business productivity by as much as 13%. Plus, opening your business to remote development unveils the prospects of hiring overseas potential.
While all this sounds appealing on paper, the truth pertains that managing a remote development team is a tedious procedure. You cannot learn to do so in a day but the process can be simplified severalfold.
How you may ask?
With the help of a handful of useful tips. Going over a quick checklist can significantly ease the management process of remote development teams. On that note, here are the top things you must consider to evaluate remote development teams for your business –
Top Tips To Manage & Evaluate Remote Development Teams
1. Go Through Tried & Tested Management Methodologies
No matter how experienced your development team is, nothing will fall into place without frequent information exchange. The best way to do this is to try out different tried and tested management methodologies to see what bodes well with your system.
One of the best alternatives to integrate is the scrum agile management process. These methodologies can facilitate accountability and honesty, boosting your overall productivity. You can also use project management software to keep track of your progress comprehensively.
2. Implement Esteemed Communication Practices
Managing remote teams is not possible without effective communication, especially if it is a development team. Coping with routine tasks can be difficult when you are home as you can easily lose track of time. However, you should not merely prioritize tasks and goals all the time.
You need to keep up with individual members to see what challenges they are experiencing. See how well the team has been performing and discuss it in meetings. Try to bridge every gap by establishing seamless communication channels.
3. Micromanaging Is Not A Viable Option
It may be a force of habit or might appear as a productive alternative, but micromanaging a remote team is not possible. You are bound to find potholes with a team based miles away from you, but you do not have to oversee every minor sub-task. If you have faith in your team, letting them off the hook every once in a while will serve you well in the long run.
4. Clarify Every Process & Requirement
While you can use project management software to manage most of your work, practising transparency can enhance the management. Your team must be aware of every project detail and requirement to deliver optimal results.
Start every project by assigning tasks and explaining the goals, milestones, and challenges to the team. Involving every team member and filling them in with the roadmap will smoothen the road towards project completion.
5. Setting Accountability Is The Way To Go
Instances like remote development teams charging money for activities they have not facilitated are common issues many business owners face. It can also lead to losing control of an extremely skilled team. Such undesirable results can be avoided altogether by scheduling routine updates.
Set up different individuals to deal with different activities. Once you have designated specific tasks to people, you can easily keep track of who is responsible if something goes wrong.
6. Automation Is The Need Of The Hour
Automation has emerged as a lifesaver for many industries, and you can use it to get esteemed outputs as well. If implemented properly, it can allow a small team to execute large scale projects comprehensively. Automation saves time, effort, and funds while improving your overall capabilities.
You can identify and reduce frequent errors leading to delay. It can also be used to perform mundane tasks like billing to keep the team focused on other tasks.
7. Acknowledge Every Small Achievement
While micromanaging is a mood kill, recognizing your team’s minor efforts does the contrary. Appreciation leads to motivation, which in turn leads to promptness and productivity. When your team is invested in the project, it will come up with intuitive ideas to better the results.
You do not have to go all-out and throw a party for every effort. Even a “well done” or trivial “gift coupon” is an apt incentive to boost someone’s morale.
8. Proffer Apt Product Run-Through & Tools
This one goes without saying but even the veterans can find it challenging to execute. A remote dev team must be equipped with high-speed internet and viable collaboration tools at all times.
They may even require the latest set of tools to keep up with the project requirements. To effectively manage a remote dev team, you must offer them quality training and tools throughout the project.
9. Capitalize On The Time Zone Differences
Time zone differences appear to be one of the biggest hurdles while working with a remote dev team. While it can be an issue, it makes round-the-clock productivity a possibility. Assign your developers with different project aspects as per their time zones.
If your team’s time zone is ahead of yours, you can assess their progress and assign new tasks the same day. It also allows you to go over different scenarios and come up with viable daily strategies. Once you master the clock, you can steer it for your benefit.
10. Visual Depiction Can Work Wonders For You
Explaining what you seek from your team can be difficult through calls can be challenging. That is why you must get any help you can avail of, like videos, storyboards, images, and infographics.
Sharing details and ideas can never go wrong, so start integrating screen-sharing tools and storyboards to help the team get a better product idea.
Wrapping Up
If you have an expert dev team working with you, managing them remotely becomes achievable. However, executing it impeccably for a long time is a challenging task. So how can it be done? By practising several handy tips.
The blog has specified the top 10 tips to manage remote development teams handily. Integrate the tips to enhance your proceedings and get quality results with your offshore team. Supersourcing can ease your search and help you to find and evaluate remote development teams for your business.
