Leobit’s Tips for Seamless Communication with Your Remote Development Team
The article is written by our IT-member Leobit.
The global pandemic forced many companies to adapt to a completely new business reality. Sometimes, to compensate for the lack of some resources and survive quarantine, the companies have no other choice but to outsource their software development. It can be quite stressful especially if they’ve never outsourced before the coronavirus outbreak. Cooperating with an outsourced vendor means that such companies have to think about not just their own profitability, but also about the remote partner as their success is highly interconnected with it.
However, they can forget about all these fears collaborating with ready-made remote teams of developers provided by well-established outsourced companies. The remote outsourced team will ensure the development of their ideas while companies can focus on core business activities.
Tip #1: Communicate a Lot
When you work with a remote team, it isn’t as easy as popping into the room next door if you have an issue. You will need to contact the team another way. Make use of tools that can boost the communication flow and streamline the working process such as Slack, JIRA, Trello, Google Hangouts, etc. It is important to make sure that all relevant project updates are timely shared.
Tip #2: Assign a Responsible Person
When outsourcing software development services, you will lose some of the control over the development process. This can be easily overcome by appointing one person from your company responsible for the regular contact and reporting. It can be a product manager or a team leader who will pass on your requirements to the team and will be also the contact point in case any clarifications are needed.
Tip #3: Be Mindful about Time Zones
Bear in mind different time zones when scheduling meetings, sending messages, and checking in. In this regard, Ukraine is a perfect outsourcing destination for the Norwegian countries. It is just one hour ahead of Norway. So if you want your remote team to keep to the same working hours as you do, it’s easy to achieve outsourcing into Ukraine. At Leobit, we are always ready to adjust our team’s schedule with your timezone and have daily visual communication via GoToMeeting, Zoom, Slack, or any other channel of your choice.
Tip #4: Set Expectations and Deadlines in Writing
Make sure that your remote team is fully informed about your communication protocols, project specifications, and any other work rules you’d like them to keep to. Setting clear expectations in writing is always helpful for any remote cooperation and will help both sides to organize the work process better.
We hope these tips will help you to successfully cooperate with the remote team if you decide on hiring one. Contact Leobit’s experts if you have questions on how to choose and collaborate with a software development vendor.
Leobit, a full-cycle web, .NET, and mobile application development provider, has a development center in Lviv, Ukraine, which counts 120+ strong software engineers, architects, testers, and UI/UX designers. Normally, all our employees work from a comfortable office from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. However, often Leobit’s team adjusts its schedule to ensure the maximum working hours overlap with clients from different time zones. Thanks to daily online correspondence and weekly online meetings, our team has successfully adapted to productive cooperation with foreign clients.
We’ve already had great knowledge and experience of how to work as a remote team, and with the beginning of the quarantine, Leobit’s employees just scaled this experience to our internal processes. Ongoing communication via different tools like Slack, Zoom, Hangouts, emails, daily and weekly teams’ meetings, monthly status company’s meeting with CEO helped Leobit’s employees embrace remote work and feel engaged in the working process.
Also, as a rule, at Leobit, we assign a project/people manager to each client’s project. PMs provide daily/weekly reports, conduct stand-up meetings, plan workload for a sprint, organize team projects visually by using Jira, and Trello. It guarantees well-adjusted processes on the project and makes sure both sides are mutually satisfied.
Lockdown didn’t affect the smooth communication we’ve had with our customers from Norway, Sweden, the USA, the UK, and other countries, and we continue to deliver high-quality services.
Having a great experience as a software development outsourcing company, we would like to share with you some tips about how to ensure seamless communication with your remote development team. Originally these tips were published in Leobit’s blog post here.
