5 Strategies to Successfully Manage Your Offshore Software Development Team

The acute shortage of engineering talent, especially in the West, has expedited globalisation like never before. Companies are no longer confining their recruitment efforts to hiring only local talent. This, in turn, has given rise to the concept of building dedicated offshore software development teams with the help of an offshore partner.

Your offshore partner is the company that is solely responsible for building your development team. They oversee the recruitment process, administrative work, setting up the office space, and all the day-to-day tasks. However, building a successful relationship with your offshore partner and your team, requires a decent amount of effort, especially if you want the desired results. So, as a client, what can you do to ensure that the collaboration goes as smoothly as possible?

In this blog post, we list down 5 key points that are instrumental in ensuring a successful collaboration between you and your offshore software development team.

Your offshore software development team is not a team that you outsource for a project or two. They are a value-adding extension of your existing workforce and are in it for the long haul, which means that simply assigning them tasks and going about your day just won’t do. They need to be able to see the bigger picture.

If your team does not understand the vision for the product, what you wish to achieve through the product, and where you see your business in the next 5 or 10 years, they simply aren’t going to be invested enough. And that’s why it’s so important to discuss the long-term goals and strategies of your business with your offshore team.

Talk to your offshore team about your business as a whole, and not just about the product or service that they’re working on. List out the business goals that you wish to achieve in the short and long-term, and brainstorm with them about how you intend to accomplish them. This allows them to think beyond the scope of a single product or service, and in turn, provide creative and innovative solutions for your business.

Even though your offshore partner is responsible for all things IT, it is still extremely crucial for you, as a client, to have a technical lead on your side. This IT specialist should be someone who has a sound knowledge of the different software products and solutions that you build, the project you’re currently working on, and all the technical responsibilities of your new offshore software development team.

If you, as the client, lack in the technical department, then your new team in another country will struggle to find a much-needed sense of direction. As experts in building offshore software development teams, we’ve noticed that the most success always comes with clients who have strong team leads that understand the technical nuances of the business.

Differences in time-zones can sometimes be a challenge when working with remote teams. However, by using overlapping hours, you can mitigate this challenge. For example, in the case of offshoring to India, the mid-day mark of the shift in India may overlap with the start of the shift in the UK.

And that’s why it’s essential to plan for the difference in working hours. Your offshore team could be anywhere between 8 to 15 hours ahead of you, and by factoring in that time-difference, you can build a more efficient schedule for your local and offshore teams. Overlap meetings, scrum-calls, and weekly catch-up calls to ensure that communication between both your teams is not affected because of the time difference.

The offshore software development company that you choose to work with is not a simple service provider; they’re much more than that. If you want to build and maintain a higher level of collaboration, then it’s time to keep aside the hierarchy and treat them as a partner.

Read more about strategies to manage the offshore software development team