Contributor: Nahian-Al-Hossain, Nascenia
Remote development will help you get a skilled team at a lower cost. However, to get the full benefit of remote development, you need to manage your team well. Below are some tips to manage your remote team properly.
1. Play as an active member of the team
Work as an active member of the development team, not as a client. Try to remove any barrier to direct communication. Keep the environment-friendly, never make it very formal.
2. Use language that every one of the team understands
An important key ingredient in effective communication is using simple language. Avoid local idioms, slang as these may cause misinterpretation to offshore development team if their native language is not English.
While meeting over Skype or any other medium, speak slowly and clearly if the language of communication is not native either for you or for offshore team.
3. Give them proper instructions
Ensure you are giving the developers proper guidelines. Give them instructions for every feature you want. Let them know what you want and ask for their opinion. It is better to use project management tools like Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp, trello, jira, slack to keep track of the correspondence.
4. Provide them with extra information
Provide as much information as you can. Give the team information about your product, your goal, mission, vision. Let them know about your client’s behavior. This will help an offshore team to understand your requirement properly. They can contribute to your idea once they have very good knowledge of your business. Sometimes a situation arises when it becomes difficult to implement exactly what you want. In such cases remote team can suggest you a good alternative solution if they have a very good knowledge on your business. Developers develop applications professionally, so chances are that they may come up with better things or things perhaps you have just overlooked.
Always communicate more when dealing with the offshore team members. It is OK to repeat yourself but it is not OK to leave out anything even though it may appear to be an obvious detail. Things that seem obvious to you may not be clear to the offshore team.
5. Monitor your remote team’s activities
Ask your remote team to send you a regular daily status of assigned tasks through email or do a Skype meeting with them every day. Then do a retrospecting meeting every week. Discuss with them what has been done in the week, what could be done better and what will be done in the next week.
The remote team would not generally express their concerns. Sometimes, they would not raise basic issues before it is past the point of no return. Make inquiries. Find out what problems they are facing and try to help them with guidance.
6. Test the features and give feedback before deploying them to production
Test every feature in the test server before deploying them to the live server. After testing gives the developers feedback. Do not forget to appreciate them, if everything is OK. If any feature is not completely OK, give them clear feedback on what else they need to do.
Above all, trust your remote team, give them authority and communicate with them well to get the maximum benefit from remote development.
Hope this helps. You can read more articles on the web and mobile application development.
Other than the above-mentioned points we found a good blog where you can find Top 10 Advantages and Disadvantages of Working from Home. If you are interested you can go to this article. Nascenia attracts best software developers in Bangladesh If you want to outsource your web or mobile application get in touch with us.
