How a Well Managed Offshore Team Can Deliver
Offshore development can feel like a hard one to navigate. Your team members aren’t physically right there in your office, sitting and tapping away to turn ideas into bits and bytes.
Over the years, many businesses and industries have made moves to work remotely and having an offshore team is not that much different. The only difference is that your code and systems creators are no longer in the same geographical time zone as you.
A well managed offshore team can deliver as effectively as a local one, if not more efficiently because they’re fully focused on the tasks at hand rather than getting distracted by empty meetings and out of scope requests.
So what does a well managed offshore team look like? Based on our experiences, here are the standards we enforce on our teams to ensure high-quality delivery of features and projects.
1. Agile Work Ethics
The issue with agile is that it’s a buzzword that many teams have picked up but fail to implement correctly. At SRG, agile means speed. This means that tasks are broken up, batched and allocated in a way that ensures maximum deliverable velocity at the highest quality.
The idea behind agile is to be able to create movement forward in a particular project through mindful coordination and assignments of tasks in the right places and to the right people.
The perk with our teams is that they understand and know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This is because they’ve worked together in the past and have figured out what the best flow is for them. Agile only works if the team is aware of each other’s skills; not based on what they say they can do, but based on what they’ve actually delivered together.
2. Lean Practices and Rapid Prototyping
When it comes to delivering projects, we understand that there’s plenty of features you want. Many mismanaged teams struggle to deliver anything in particular because they are constantly being pulled in multiple directions.
Nothing gets done as a result and the project keeps getting delayed.
What makes SRG different is that we employ lean practices and rapid prototyping methodologies in order to move a project forward. That’s because we order your features and system’s needs based on priority and impact.
We work on understanding your business first so we can make an impact on what’s most important to you.
Teams that fail are often teams that fail to understand and distinguish between your business needs and wants. At SRG, our teams work on identifying the systems’ bottlenecks and roadblocks and work to clear them out in order to accelerate software and feature deliverables.
3. Effective Communication Channels
Communication is key when it comes to moving anything forward. Badly managed offshore teams often have a breakdown in communication, either due to language barriers, inability to understand the brief or lack of accountability and quality tracking in their code.
At SRG, we’ve established process flows and employ methods of communication that work between the different types of stakeholder relationships. These relationships include the business and the developers, between the developers within the team, and the project manager and the business.
Teams that fail often don’t take these kinds of relationships into account, but we do. Why? Because we know from experience that a connected development team is more effective and efficient in helping solve business problems through software solutions.
4. Clear Work Funnel and Minimizing Roadblocks
Roadblocks are often the bane of software delivery velocity. It can slow a team down, sometimes to a grinding halt. The difference between badly managed and well-managed teams is that well-managed teams are quick to raise and resolve these roadblocks.
How?
It’s to do with the team’s communication channels, how issues are raised and the manager’s ability to detect and prioritize based on importance.
And that’s one of our strengths at SRG — we’ve got people that have both common sense and business sense, making it easier for our teams to function cohesively and work as a group rather than as isolated developers.
Why You Need to Talk to Us
When it comes to software delivery, a well managed offshore team can be as effective, if not better, than a good local team.
Badly managed teams can happen anywhere. It doesn’t matter if they are local or offshore. The point of difference that SRG provides is that we know how to run teams that deliver.
Our teams and project managers are proactive enough to be self-organizing, meaning that you have more time to strategize and run your business while we help you create systems that help you do what you do best.
Co-authored by:
Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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