How can you manage your offshore software development team?

Once you’ve done all the groundwork, the next step is to start building your offshore team with an offshore development centre that you can trust. Your offshore partner will take care of the recruitment, administration, and everything in between. However, as a stakeholder in the business, here are some tips on how you can manage your offshore team.

Share the vision and mission of your company

The first step towards a successful collaboration with your offshore team is to explain the vision and mission of your business to them. This is an opportunity to formally introduce the objectives, goals, and needs of your business and define where you see your company in the next couple of years.

A lot of the time, companies see their offshore team only as an execution partner for their development processes and nothing more. However, establishing a connection with your remote team is extremely important. The more they know about your brand, what you want to build, and why, the more invested they’re going to become in the vision and mission of your company.

Right from the moment you start building your offshore team, you should always have a clear vision and mission for your project, and that vision must be consistently and continuously communicated to your offshore team.

Bridge the culture gap

When working with a local team in the US and an offshore team in a country like India, you’re bound to come across some cultural differences. The key is to foster a unified culture of belonging across both your teams.

Remind your teams that they are both working towards a common goal and that if the project is a success, then everyone wins – together. It doesn’t matter where the person sits or what his role in the organization is.

As the lead on a project, it is your responsibility to make your offshore team feel appreciated and recognized. Make it your mission to ensure that every single person who is contributing to your project feels included, and as a part of your greater vision.

Visit your offshore team from time to time; conduct ice-breaker conference calls where both your teams get a chance to get to know each other and always be vocal about how you feel about their collaboration.

Communicate effectively

Effective communication is the key to a successful partnership with your offshore team, and many times, this aspect is overlooked by companies.

It is crucial to foster an environment in which effective communication becomes the first, and most important goal, without which your development project can derail. Some communication channels that you can use between your in-house and virtual teams include:

• E-mails: official communication, schedules, and project meeting notes can be shared via emails.
• Instant messaging: Instant messaging tools like Slack and Skype work best for quick clarifications, status updates, and queries.
• Productivity tools: Project management is crucial when working with offshore teams because without it, you wouldn’t know what your remote team is working on. Tools like JIRA, Asana, and Basecamp are worth exploring.

These are just a few of the many strategies that you can implement when working with remote teams. We’ve written an entire blog post dedicated to the topic — a resource that can prove to be extremely helpful for your business.

Now that you know everything there is about offshore software development and how it can be a great move for your business, feel free to reach out to us by filling out the contact form, and let’s get started!