Tips To Manage Successfully Your Remote Dedicated Software Development Team

Management is always a challenge and an art. No matter what team you work with, it is a challenge to setup and control the processes, handle the issues and create the positive atmosphere in a team. But management of an in-house team may seem to be a piece of cake comparing to a management of a remote team. But is it really a challenge? Let's dive deeper into the question, understand the core of the remote development team management and take a look at tips that may help with that.

The Cornerstones of Cooperation with the Remote Team

From time to time, we face the clients’ hesitation about the cooperation with the remote teams. Some of the interested entrepreneurs are literally afraid of cooperating with the developers across the ocean. But first of all, we would like to say that there is nothing to be afraid of.
As the experience shows, there are 3 main challenging points the business owners are afraid of.

1. Language. The language knowledge is one of the must-have skills when software engineers are applying for a job. What is more, you can check your potential partner’s English during the very first conversation.
2. Time zones. This argument is not as simple as the previous one but still, it is not a reason to be afraid of cooperation with the remote team. Depending on your location, time differences may be quite acceptable for both sides of cooperation.
3. Culture. Professionals do not express their personal preferences or their native cultural specifics at work. The point is to establish great communications process and deliver a perfect product to a customer. All the rest does not play a vital role in cooperation.

As you can see, those most common opinions about the outsourcing pitfalls are nothing to be afraid of in the long run.

Tips to Manage Successfully Your Remote Development Team

Even great renowned enterprises, such as IBM create guides on how to cooperate with a remote team successfully and extend one’s business reach by taking simple steps. And we gathered this information to help you get used to the remote team management. In order to prevent some possible issues and difficulties, we created a list of top tips on how to manage a remote team.
Before we start, let’s take a look at the factors that can impact the management:

Communication
Communication is a crucial part of every business process though it is often underestimated by both sides of cooperation. The first step to solve the issue is to tell about it. So pay your attention to communication when managing a remote development team.

Motivation
Productivity can never be increased without a real motivation. Positive attitude and incredible results demonstrated by motivated team simplify the management considerably. It is important to conduct a research and find out what motivates your remote employees in the best way.

Trust
Ask yourself - "do I trust those people?”. If you hesitate to answer the question precisely, you need to change your opinion about the whole modern IT development world. The convictions are sometimes very hard to break, as well as it is hard to understand that it does not matter where the person works from. The point is to get good working results. And lack of trust can destroy the cooperation completely.
By implementing simple approaches to your management process, you will feel a considerable improvement. We still have something more to advise you on. The first step to the successful management is a proper process organization. There are several useful tips you may find suitable for building a process within your team:

Follow The Iterative Principles
Dividing your project into small pieces is a great way to keep a hand on a pulse of every change. Iterations help to control the development process completely and with no troubles, fix bugs in time, and deliver better quality.

Schedule The Meetings
Sometimes, meetings may be dull. Sometimes they are not informative and even senseless. But the key point is to hold a meeting with your remote development team every single day or as often as it is needed for your particular business needs. It is a brilliant way to make your remote colleagues feel like they are a part of something bigger. There is no better way to make you feel like they are real people, with real needs and competent opinions.

Review the Performance
At the end of an iteration or a number of iterations organize a performance reviews meetings. This retrospective will allow you to take a look at the newly implemented features and share the feedback. This can raise the team spirit and create a friendly atmosphere in a team.

Use Convenient Management Tools
The whiteboard is not one and the only thing for the successful management, as well as phone calls, are not the only way to reach your remote development team. This is why another considerable point of process improvement is selecting right tools for management purposes.
Top things you need to be familiar with to manage your remote development team easily:

1. Digital Scrum board
2. Dropbox & Google Drive
3. Project management tool

The most popular IT product management tools right now are Jira and Trello. Communication may be conducted via Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, or Slack. According to your needs, you may choose the most suitable one. All of these tools have convenient interface and chats alongside with other messaging and even video conferences-related features. Pay attention to the performance of these tools as it may vary.
InVision and similar tools would provide you with the assistance to work with the design team. Thanks to these solutions one can create prototypes and share opinions about them. The most widespread and popular code management systems are Bitbucket and GitHub. These are the large repositories with various features useful for both developers and managers.

Bottom Line

The remote development management may seem difficult, but it is not as difficult as you may think. By implementing proper approaches, techniques, and tools to in your business processes, you can easily become the best project manager your dedicated software development team has ever worked with. Talk to you co-workers, trust them, motivate them, and you will reach the top together!шаблоны для dle 11.2