How to handle offshore teams efficiently – a simplified guide

Building an Offshore team is really easy these days;  you simply find a company that is offering remote developers or remote development teams, get in touch with them, and receive profiles for the technologies that you need in less than a week. 

The real challenge is not about building an offshore team but in handling them. Most of the developers, designers, and product managers are thousands of miles away and you need to constantly keep them in the loop, build a repo with them, and make them passionately work on your project.

To handle an offshore team efficiently, you will need to frequently communicate, discuss your project goals, efficiently utilise overlapping hours, and avoid micromanagement. You will have to treat your offshore team members as partners. You will also be setting clear goals and expectations from each team member. 

In this article we’ll discuss how you can manage and handle an offshore team efficiently so that you can make maximum use of your time and resources. Additional it is important to learn how to handle offshore team because even if you have hired some of the best professionals in the world, if you don’t have a proper management system aligned with your goals, or how each offshore team member adds value to your project, are going to lose a lot of time and money simply because the right person was not informed and the right decisions were not taken as and when required. 

Discuss your project goals

Discussing your project requirement clearly is essential because each team member needs to know exactly what they need to do and how they should go about doing it. it is advisable that everything is efficiently communicated using project management tools and deliverables should be clearly defined. Unless you give your team a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve, you won’t be able to make the best of them. When it comes to  Offshore teams, most of the individuals you hire will have a difference for a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve unless you discuss your project Google with them regularly.

Communicate frequently 

Clearly communicating your requirements is not just about using the right tools for establishing the right frameworks for the project. every individual in your Offshore Team should know who they report to their availability, or even the expected time of response. there is nothing more important than filling the gap of not getting the right response at the right time. maintaining the availability of each member of the schedules, and tracking the progress and responses is must. 

Use simpler language

Most of the communication with the offshore team will happen through chats and calls. While English could be your first language, your offshore development team’s language could be different. It is important to use a simple language so that your team clearly understands what you are trying to say, and you do that by avoiding difficult words, metaphors and  jargons. Nothing beats a clearly explained project requirement. 

Utilise overlapping hours

One of the biggest challenges you face with the offshore team is that of  overlapping hours, which means the time when both your in-house and offshore team are available for communication. For example, if you’re outsourcing to India, or your development team is operating on an Indian time zone, your offshore team members’ start of your working hours will overlap with the end of the working hours for your in-house team. This time slot is great for quick communications and short meetings that will define what your offshore team will do in India the next day and what you are working on today.

Understand team culture

Understanding your offshore team’s country and culture offers great advantages in helping you better interact with them. Apart from learning about the country’s culture, try to understand the work culture, which will help you understand how to proceed with your project development.  Also try to choose a company that helps to align your offshore team with your culture and work environment.

Use Agile Methodology 

Any software development requires a very high level of interaction and connectivity between teams and defines goals. adopting Agile methodology for your in-house team as well as the Offshore team can significantly improve your level of efficiency.

Now let’s talk about what really is and why you should be dropped into it right away for your Offshore teams.  Agile methodology is a standard project management methodology that has been constantly growing in number for the last 10 years because it offers significant improvements in project management.  According to the reports published on Agile methodology, 97% of the respondents organisations said that they practice Agile development. Over 52% respondents say that even more than half of the teams use Agile as the primary project management methodology.  And about 25% respondents say that their complete teams use Agile methodology.

The simplest way to define agile methodology is that it divides projects into short phases and strengths for each part of the project. The length of the project Prince may vary but it removes all of the complexities and decision anxiety, making it easier for teams to take control of the particular part of the project without doing it all at the same time. 

Don’t micromanage

When your teams are removed, you will naturally experience a state where you feel out of control. This does not mean that you have to micromanage your offshore team. Micro management of your team can really break the trust between your offshore team members and yourself. You can experience loss of productivity and even the departure of good employees. 

The simplest thing to do is to appoint a senior developer as a team lead or or even higher project manager to take care of the details for you.  and because a project manager or a team lead is good at managing projects and teams, taking bringin relaxed positive environment for your team members. 

Treat offshore team as your partner

Building an offshore team is not just about hiring and managing them to finish your project. You need to make sure that you treat them right because they are humans at the other end of the line. An employer that is acknowledged for the hard work and dedication, someone who is appreciated for the effort, their efforts will naturally work on your project with passion.

Set clear rules

Setting clear rules as to how your employee should react, how they should be working, their leave policies, the reporting policies, and their work policies will help you streamline and handle your offshore team better. One of the reasons offshore teams fail is because there is no set of clear rules defined for those employees. When clear rules are defined, your offshore team members will have a very definite understanding of what you expect from them to do for any challenges that they have to face during the process of development.

For example, if you’re hiring an offshore development team for mobile application development, your offshore team can have a clear understanding of what the development process is, what challenges they’ll face during the development process, and what rules they can follow during that particular challenge.

Implement work analytics

By implementing work analytics you create a database of each offshore development team member that is working on the project. With the help of work and performance analytics, you will be able to understand which offshore member is performing with high productivity and which one is lagging behind on their work.

Of course, having someone oversee the work that is done by each offshore development team member becomes crucially important. The data that is accumulated from each employee’s work behaviour can be used to offer them feedback, appreciate them, reward them, or understand what is not working as planned with the employee.

This data can be used to find more great employees and also to replace the ones that are not performing up to speed with your requirement. At freeman technologies we use work analytics to offer inside employees performance to our clients which has helped us offer great talent at a very reasonable price to them.

Provide constant feedback

Providing constant feedback is at the core of managing a great offshore team. With feedback, we can realign employees’ behaviour and performance, and bring them up to speed with that of the project requirement and deadlines.