Are you looking forward to building a remote software development team? If yes, you’re not alone. Companies build remote teams all the time, especially Fortune-500 organizations that outsource some of their functions to better focus on critical aspects like strategy and business development, reduce costs, and build high-quality products faster. You can reap maximum benefits and take your business to the next level by Investing in a remote software development team.
However, successfully building and managing a
remote development team is easier said than done. While it offers compelling benefits, many challenges are also involved. If you’re not mindful of these challenges, the idea of outsourcing your project to a remote team can quickly become a nightmare.
In this blog, we’ll guide you on how to build a suitable remote development team that can help you deliver innovation at high speed. Let’s begin:
Four Steps to Building a Remote Software Development Team
Step 1: Hire the right people
While this is a no-brainer, people make the best software development teams – whether in-house or remote. Hence, you must start by hiring candidates in your remote team who are the right fit for your business both in terms of technical skills and your company’s vision.
Here are the qualities you must look for in candidates while hiring them for your remote team:
A. Ability to work in a team
Developing a successful product is about more than just writing code. Skills like communication, collaboration, and team spirit also count. Candidates who can quickly get along with a team have greater chances of doing high-quality work than someone full of themselves. Hence, you should pay close attention to whether the candidate is a team player. Pay attention to the following hints:
- Ask candidates about their work process. How much emphasis do they put on communication and collaboration?
- Analyze what a candidate says about their past team. A team player would never badmouth their colleagues or blame them for failures.
- Ask the candidate how they like to work and pay attention to what they value the most: their achievements or wins as a team.
Always remember there’s no “I” in a software development team, especially agile software development. You win as a team and also lose as a team. You can’t let a person’s ego affect the team’s progress. Hence, hire a team player to save yourself from regretting later.
B. Communication and collaboration skills
Communication silos are the biggest hurdles to building a high-quality product. They often lead to miscommunication, wrong assumptions, and a product that doesn’t solve the purpose. Hence, looking for candidates who can efficiently and seamlessly communicate within a team would be best. They must not fear asking questions, sharing ideas, or participating in healthy discussions.
To such candidates for your remote team, observe your prospective team member’s communication skills. Analyze how clearly they can understand and communicate something related to your work. It is especially essential in a remote environment where many linguistic and cultural barriers exist.
C. Business-oriented
You may hire the best global talent in your remote software development team. But it’s of no use if the candidates you hire don’t bring any benefit to the business. Hence, you must hire candidates who are business-oriented and self-aware of how their every step would benefit your business.
To know whether a candidate is business-oriented, you must pay close attention to the questions they ask during the interview. Do the questions relate to your business goals? If yes, you’ve found the right fit because such candidates will be more helpful in achieving your business goals. If not, ask them how they could help you achieve your business objectives. This way, you would get a clear idea of whether you should hire a candidate.
Once you’ve found and hired the right members in your software development, we can move towards the next step.
Step 2: Organize your work progress
Hiring the right team is a significant milestone, but only enough if you organize them to work productively. Hence, the next step is to create operational guidelines, deadlines, and documentation defining the role of each member to ensure each member knows what’s expected from them. It would also provide them with a blueprint to work more productively.
Here’s how you can organize your remote software development team:
A. Convey your project to the team
The last thing you would want is to leave your remote team in any ambiguity about the project. It’s because your in-house team can approach you anytime if there’s confusion, but a remote team has to engage in a lot of to-and-fro communication. It can lead to unnecessary delays and costly changes later.
To ensure your remote team is fully prepared before they start working on the project, you must present all project-related details, such as:
- Your project’s previous history.
- Your business goals and expectations from the remote team.
- Product’s end users and target market.
B. Facilitate proper communication measures and protocols
Communication is critical while working with a remote team. The proper communication measures ensure they can contact you anytime with queries. There should also be project management tools to track work progress. It would help ensure that your investment and time go in the right direction.
We use some tools for communication:
- Slack and Microsoft Teams – For messaging.
- Basecamp and Jira – for project management.
- Zoom and Google Meet – For video conference.
C. Properly document everything to avoid confusion
Much confusion happens when the project’s requirements and scope are unclear to your remote software development team. Hence, it’s essential to document everything, from functional and non-functional requirements to your vision and core values.
Some remote software development teams even help you outline requirements and create software documentation.
Step 3: Facilitate the environment for communication
High-quality communication is critical for efficiently managing a remote software development team. Without it, your entire team can crumble like a house of cards. Organized communication helps you keep track of everything from work progress to how your product will finally pan out. Hence, you must set up high-quality contact with your team. Here’s how you can do that:
A. Schedule regular meetings using calendar software
Excellent communication happens regularly. When you keep your meetings organized, your project stays on track, and development happens how you want. Also, periodically checking on your team ensures that the work occurs smoothly and blockers are removed on time. So, regular meetings are a must, especially the following will help you keep your project in check:
- Backlog grooming meetings to discuss the pending items on the backlog and how the team plans to complete them.
- Planning meetings in which the section lists all the tasks in priority order and creates a roadmap to achieve them.
- Daily check-ins to remain in touch with the team and help with any blockers involved.
- Sprint demo to present a completed feature of a project.
- Retrospectives reflect what went wrong in a sprint and how we can improve things in future sprints.
B. Forge personal connections
Regular meetings help you keep in touch with your remote, but something else can match a personal relationship with team members. Teams put in their best efforts when you recognize and encourage them regularly. Hence, your focus shouldn’t be on managing the team alone and forging strong relationships with candidates. You can do that by:
Setting up informal meetings or 1:1 sessions with team members regularly. It would help you to know them better.
Addressing each member by their name. It shows that you care about members and pay them attention.
Regularly check in with your remote team to ensure they work well. Also, support them during tough times. They would appreciate it if you were attentive to their needs.
Step 4: Track and monitor the project progress
Your responsibility doesn’t end with you setting up the remote team. It starts after the team begins working. Regularly track your team’s performance to identify blockers and optimize development. It would ensure that you have control over your product’s development and that the final product is as expected.
ActivTrak, Hubstaff, ProofHub, Time Doctor, and DeskTime are popular tools to monitor the performance of your remote software development team. They help you ensure it is working diligently on your project.
Best Practices to Manage a Remote Software Development Team
1. Improve communication with your remote software development team
Communication is a significant challenge while managing software development. There’s the time zone difference as well as cultural and linguistic barriers. If the communication with the remote software development team is not up to the mark, there will be miscommunication and delays. Hence, your prime focus should be on optimizing the communication.
Here are the measures to optimize communication with your remote team:
- Hold regular meetings and feedback sessions.
- Invest in remote communication and project management tools like Trello, GitHub, Google Drive, Zoom, and Slack to facilitate quick communication and collaboration.
- Encourage the remote team to ask questions or contact you if they need assistance.
2. Consider long-term goals
If you want to make the most out of your remote software development team, your focus must be on a long-term vision than day-to-day tasks. This way, you would refrain from deflecting from your idea and getting stuck in trivial undertakings. Also, your remote team is independent and goal-oriented instead of your in-house team. Hence, it would benefit you more if you directly communicated your pain points and project vision instead of micromanaging, as they would be more creative this way.
3. Use time zone differences to your advantage
Time zone differences are often seen as challenging in managing remote software development. But with some planning, you can use it for your benefit. Here’s how:
Suppose seven members of your remote software development team work across different time zones. You can let each member take over various aspects of your project. This way, a member ahead of your time zone can finish the work soon, and you would have enough time to review it and offer feedback on the same day. Similarly, if you’re ahead of a member’s Timezone, you can prepare everything for them before they take over the tasks the next day.
As a result, you would have round-the-clock efficiency, and you can enhance your productivity.
4. Reward your developers
When working with a team, whether in-house or remote, its members look up to you. Hence, how you perceive them is key in deciding whether they will succeed or fail. That’s why you must not forget to recognize them for their contribution and reward them for small wins. This way, they would work with more motivation.
Compliments and small gifts like t-shirts, mugs, and badges with the company logo can significantly boost their morale. You can also offer them bonuses to appreciate their hard work on special occasions.
5. Don’t let distance kill the team spirit
Managing a remote team is different than managing an in-house staff. You can meet your in-house team every day. You don’t get the same luxury with your remote software development team through video calls and conferences.
However, this shouldn’t create a “we vs. them” mindset in your software development team. Treat them as a part of your team. Involve them in meetings, special occasions, and bond through informal sessions. It would keep the team spirit alive irrespective of the distance.
In Conclusion
Hiring and managing a remote team is challenging. But if you follow the right approach and keep some practical tips in mind, you can easily get along with it. You only need to hire the right candidate, set up a straightforward process, facilitate seamless communication, and actively monitor the development process. Also, avoiding pitfalls that may hamper your product’s development would be best.
Hopefully, the blog gave you enough idea of how to efficiently hire and manage the right software development team that can do justice to your time, money, and effort. Now, it’s time to implement these things practically to find the right software development partner. Best of luck!
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