How To Manage A Remote Development Team? - Prismetric

How To Manage A Remote Development Team?

The Ultimate Guide to Running a Remote Development Team

Remote work is not only the hottest trend but has become a state of business shortly. The Corona outbreak accelerated the shift to offsite, remote working. The stats confirm the same facts.

Before the pandemic hit the world, 20% of US employees worked remotely, which reached its ceiling with 71% growth, post-Covid. Even after the world is presumed to pre-pandemic levels, 54% of remote workers still want to work from home.

55% of the workplaces making great strides in running remote development teams to cherish the benefits associated with it. The 115% rise in telecommuting has helped remote development in gaining momentum rapidly. However, the business that is hiring full-time remote development team is experiencing benefits and challenges that are creating confusion regarding this move.

In this guide, we will discuss everything from remote development team hiring advantages and challenges to their solution and best practices to hire a dedicated team.

What is a Remote Developer?

The remote developers are the dedicated resources that work for the businesses/companies full-time and perform the same set of tasks, but from home or a different remote location other that where outsourcing company is established. The nature of remote working is completely virtual, so there is no face-to-face interaction involved for anything related to the project. The remote developers communicate and collaborate through digital communication channels such as Skype, email, phone, or others.

Hire developers to get the project done successfully while cherishing the advantages that a remote software development team brings to the table.

How is Remote Development Team hiring beneficial for your business?

Remote Development Team Key Business Advantages

The catalyzed remote working trend has brought a lot of advantages to businesses from improved productivity and availability with a diverse team to reduced costs of project development. Businesses need a clear picture to believe in something and in this case knowing when to hire remote developers just adds to the list of reasons. After this, it makes perfect sense for businesses to find a remote development team and reap the benefits associated with offshore development team hiring.

Improved accessibility to global talent

When you Hire Remote Developers from a top offshore IT development company for your project, you may want to cross geographical boundaries. This approach increases the access to worldwide talent that fits the bill for your business project requirements. Conclusively, the businesses get upskilled, trained, experienced, and specialized developers from the leading IT development outsourcing service providing partners that add value to the project.

Enhanced productivity

Aspects of Remote Employees

Source

The remote team has the flexibility to work at a preferred time and location provided they are available for the stand-up calls and other meetings as and when required. Further, the remote development team is expected to follow certain set standards of development and processes that will help ensure a quality product is delivered to the business by the software development outsourcing company. The convenience makes the workforce happy and allows them to provide better productivity at work.

Reduced cost

Hiring an offshore team means the businesses don’t need to set up the office infrastructure for the hired developers. The cost of infrastructure from the development budget gets saved as hire remote developers work from the offshore development center that you have selected for your project development.

Hiring in-house developers is an expensive affair, which is eliminated with the remote model. The businesses don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on developers’ hiring, training, salary, and extra facilities as they are handled by the outsourcing company. As a business owner, you only need to pay for the working hours that the team worked for based on agreed hourly rates as per your software development contract.

Available 24/7

The remote developers even though in different time zones are readily available to provide support and maintenance services 24/7. It facilitates timely project development, deployment, and integration without any delay. Thereby the remote team from outsourcing company enables businesses to keep the software up and running 24/7 flawlessly with zero downtime.

The range of benefits busts all the myths about hiring remote developers that businesses have in mind when they wanted to hire a remote team. Don’t let the mental roadblocks influence your decision.

What are the challenges you may face with Remote Development Team management?

Challenges of Managing a Remote Team and How to Overcome Them

The recent crisis brought the challenge and remote working became a new norm. Now, Hiring a remote dedicated development team for your project requirement and managing them can be challenging for the businesses if not done properly. Here’s the list of issues that businesses face with remote development team management and the solutions to overcome them.

Tracking project progress

It’s difficult to track how the selected development team working remotely, performs and accomplishes their assigned tasks. The unclear information doesn’t allow the business to completely utilize the developers’ time or encourage them for increasing their productivity. Without keeping tabs on everything that developers are doing remotely, it’s impossible to set clear expectations and make them finish the project before the deadline.

Solution: Defining short milestones or assigning subtasks that need to be completed in a day or performance goals would help in keeping the offshore developers on their toes and knowing they are working as expected. Also, the project management system helps a ton in keeping an eagle eye on everything with micromanagement.

Cultural differences

There is a chance of cultural differences in between the business and the offshore developers hired since both are from different corners of the world that follows distinct cultures and this might seem to be a hard nut to crack. To add to it, the remote development team and the outsourcing development firm may have different work cultures, working hours, work ethics, and language differences, hence businesses could find it difficult to get acquainted with their values and work ethics with the pool of remotely working people.

Solution: Building a remote work culture will be the key here to get the best services.the business should create a healthy environment for the dedicated development team working remotely by interacting with them regularly and encouraging them to share their views without hesitation. Businesses should improve collaboration with multi-cultural distributed teams working dedicatedly on their project by focusing on empathy, showing trust in them, transparency, awareness, and openness.

Trust remains an issue

Both stakeholders- the business and remote development team members have a trust issue with each other. Businesses can be suspicious if their product development is done accurately by the remote team members and will the team keeps the project idea confidential as defined or not. While on the other hand, the remote developers are concerned with payment, working hours, scope, and a lot more. the range of concerns won’t allow them to work mutually in a sound way.

Solution: The businesses should determine the project scope, expectations, working hours, hourly rates, and payment timeline before the project starts which zero down the doubts that developers may have in their minds. Businesses when focusing only on results such as the desired build getting completed within a stipulated time nurtures trust in the experienced team of developers.

Scheduling becomes a task

When you hire offshore development team to work remotely on your business’ project needs, video meetings or phone call schedules remain a concern due to time zone differences. It leads to limited communication that hinders productivity and won’t allow the development of project to progress as expected.

Solution: Troublesome scheduling challenges are resolved using digital communication tools such as video conferencing, video meetings, or scheduling a call at the time when both parties are available. The team members providing dedicated remote development services are made to select the time according to their mutual availability so that meeting scheduling becomes as easy as possible.

Ensuring stellar collaboration is difficult

It’s difficult for remote developers to communicate and collaborate with no face-to-face interaction involved. The opacity in the tasks assigned won’t allow the team members to know what others are working on. Email is a form of communication but doesn’t enable instant communication and facilitate collaboration as required in IT project development. The delays in feedback won’t allow the project to complete before the deadline.

Solution: Defining a digital communication channel that facilitates two-way communication in real-time is required that helps to keep every member of the remote development team and business owner on the same page.

Securing data is a hard nut to crack

When sharing the project idea with the remote team members for your product development, the businesses risk getting their idea misused or shared with third parties. Also, the continuous interaction through digital channels involves the risks of cyber security, data breach, data loss or data theft.

Solution: The business organizations should sign an NDA with the remote development team in addition to all the other software development outsourcing documentation to ensure the project idea and related data remain safe. Furthermore, the sensitive data remains protected by ensuring data encryption methods are used and making developers connect using secure wireless access points.

The unique process of Hiring a Remote Development Team

Hiring remote development team members is not a run-of-the-mill job. It requires a lot of preparation, and strategic planning to hire the best developers and other talented team members that are a great fit for your project.

Before you jump on the hiring bandwagon, you should be clear with a couple of things- project type (long or short), require project manager (You have one or need to hire), development approach (Need to outsource the whole project or are you willing to hire developers separately to work as a team and manage all the management aspects yourself), data handling (sensitive data needs to be protected with advanced security measures or not), and more.

The next important aspect to know prior to hiring remote developers is about the budget required to hire developers who can work remotely and dedicatedly based on your requirements. when you are clear with all these things, it’s time to get started and proceed step by step with the search to find the most suitable experienced remote development team at your disposal.

  • Specify project needs that unveil the tech expertise required and the number of hours that dedicated development team members need to work.
  • Select outsourcing destinations according to preferences for time zone, developers’ rates, and tech talent pool.
  • Screen the developers with a face-to-face video interview to assess their tech skills, experience, communication skills, and proficiency for the project.
  • Sign an agreement after selecting the specialized developers for your project to work remotely.

If you are stuck somewhere, refer to the guide on how to hire remote developers that help you know various things in detail.

How to Effectively Manage a Remote Team?

How do You Manage a Remote Development Team

At times, maintaining a professional relationship with remotely working development team members is not an easy task. The technology progress has improved accessibility, connectivity, and the ways to empower the remote team alongside enabling their management. Here we help you know how to get the remote team work as anticipated with the best management tips.

Determine the project scope, timeline, and budget

Setting business project expectations early and clearly is a great approach to inform the remote team about when they are expected to be available despite having different time zones, the hours they need to work to embrace cultural diversity, attend pre-scheduled meetings, and collaborate through selected communication channels, and project deadlines.

At first, making the project scope clear helps in allowing the members of the offshore team to understand the vision and goal of the project, target audience, and competition. This information enables the remote team to add value to the project and find out the obstacles that may arise from the get-go based on the market research and analysis.

The difference in time zone makes it difficult for the remote team to accomplish the project before the deadline because of workflow holdups, lack of communication, and other things. The business should identify the time where the schedule overlaps and all of the dedicated resources available for meeting that improves collaboration, no miscommunication, least holdups, and efficient communication. You can allow the team to work in a day at their flexible hours but must be available during the scheduled time for meetings, scrum, programming, Q&A sessions, and others.

Businesses can also take time zone to their advantage in a couple of ways. For instance, when the team is ahead of your time zone, you will get time to check the work and provide feedback on the same day. If your time zone is ahead of the remote team, the business gets optimal time to prepare tasks for the remote development team. This way the business can achieve round-the-clock efficiency when dedicated pool of members are made to work on the different aspects of the project.

Pre-defining the project scope and making the most out of time zone differences allow the remote development team to complete the project before the deadline without budget overruns.

Assess the progress

The remote collaboration tools help in avoiding setbacks in communication when working with a remote team. However, it’s identified that tracking progress, performance, and results daily is difficult, especially with a remote team. The best way is to keep long-term goals for the team members and track their progress. That’s where a project management system is a good solution to share and monitor the project goals, and track if the team understood their responsibilities and met their objectives.

Besides, when the developers or dedicated team members have multiple tasks assigned and they are stuck at one point, they don’t waste time fixing the problem. Instead, they move on to other tasks and come back to the issue to fix it.

The micromanagement impedes their productivity because the remote team is more creative when they are given flexibility. Communicate the project goals and feedback regarding builds that make them perform to the notch. The one-to-one meetings are a great help to make them what the business intends them to do.

Don’t be so rigid

The businesses communicate frequently with the project manager, but not the team, which is not an ideal practice. The project manager is not the only one responsible for remote development team handling. Instead, you should regularly communicate with each team member for a better understanding of the progress of project development and the achievement of the goals.

The compliments and praises are such appreciations that make skilled development team members happy and make them feel free to share their concerns with you. Also, sending them small presents such as t-shirts, mugs, or badges with business logo improve the remote team’s morale, which makes them work better and harder.

Also, be open to communicating the changes in project goals or strategies that make the team feel a part of the business project and work wholeheartedly on the project. Schedule video calls regularly to uplift the facetime with them, which is a good opportunity to build a bond. Don’t overdo it, but keep it as a part of the routine. It builds a better relationship with the team members and nurtures the trust factor.

Don’t be just outcome-focused

When managing a dedicated development team, try to deal with the team as a mentor who aims to assist the team in all things. It requires businesses to treat them as an in-house team and just work from a distance. Be careful with the words when you deal with the offshore team as a ‘we’ vs. ‘them’ mentality takes over the team spirit. It makes the team actively participate in project progress and share the knowledge to improve the business project.

This approach enables a culturally diverse, dynamic, and experienced team to work in high spirits, which ultimately maximizes productivity.

The tools leveraged for remote team management

Remote Team Management Tools

Technology advancement has made remote management damn easier than it’s ever imagined before a decade. There are various tools available from project management to communication and collaboration that are taking the remote development space by storm.

We have Trello PMS for remote team management, slack for seamless communication across all the devices, Github for improved collaboration, Google Drive to share and store documents, GoToMeeting, and Zoom as video conferencing applications, and many more.

Best Project management tools:

  • Monday
  • Trello
  • Basecamp
  • Jira

Essential Communication tools:

  • Google Meet
  • Zoom
  • Skype
  • Slack
  • UberConference
  • TeamViewer
  • Zoho Meeting
  • Flock
  • Microsoft Teams

Trending Document collaboration tools:

  • Google Docs
  • Zoho Writer
  • Bit.ai
  • Dropbox Paper
  • Document360
  • ClickUp

Ready to work with a great remote development team?

The remote development team concept is alive in the world for two decades, but its importance is not realized at scale. COVID-19 has shown the power and benefits of the dedicated development team members working remotely. Without managing the remote team rightly, achieving grandeur success with the business project is impossible.

The secret sauce of the best remote development team management is making the team understand your project and its goals. Further, communicating with them regularly through video conferencing calls despite having time zone differences matters as such simple efforts that you put in help build relationships. Here’s a tip to get the team to challenge their own limits, make sure that you reward the team to boost their morale and make them deliver quality results. Not to forget, treat them as valuable assets with inclusive and diverse efforts to stay on top of everything.

Before managing the team, you need to search and hire dedicated developers team, which is a time-consuming affair. At Prismetric, you will have a pool of talented developers that are specialized in niche technologies and are available for hire. Also, you can get a custom quote for the offshore team hiring for your business project. Know in detail. Contact us now!

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