On-boarding the right talent is critical when setting up an offshore team. Hiring right is not just about seeing their technical proficiency but also seeing someone who has the zeal for learning and most importantly someone who can mold into your company culture.
Businesses worldwide are embracing IT outsourcing. Skill crunch management, cost optimization, efficiency improvements are some of the reasons why outsourcing appears alluring to software development and maintenance companies. Several reports show that India is a front runner in outsourcing.
However, considering the challenges with the outsourcing model, companies now are tending towards setting up their own offshore development centers teams in India. This is especially true with small and medium-size companies that prefer tighter collaboration with the teams, need specific domain expertise, and want to build a team with niche skills.
However, if you are not vigilant, setting up a remote team can come around to be a nightmare. Here we are sharing our best tips for you from our 15 years of experience in helping companies around the world set up hundreds of offshore software development centers in India.
Tip 1: Hire the right resource
Onboarding the right talent is critical when setting up a remote software development team. Holding extensive technical tests helps filter out candidates based on their technical proficiency. It is ideal to look for candidates who have a zeal for learning, have practical projects to showcase, and who exhibit the right team spirit.
Along with this, it is paramount to consider whether or not a candidate is a cultural fit. Cultural integration matters as your remote teams need to gel-up naturally with your existing employees. It then feels just like an extended arm working without any friction toward shared goals.
It helps for you to check candidates on the basis of all- experience, skillset, certifications, cultural mindset, attitude, and team spirit, to ensure they fit in well with your organization and understand your values as their own.
According to the US Department of Labor, the average cost of a bad hire can equal 30 percent of their annual earnings. This means to say if you make the wrong hire for an application developer earning $60,000, it actually costs you $78,000. While a bad hire can be expensive, the right one can improve the efficiency of the development process and enhance the quality of the deliverables.
Tip 2: Establish a robust and direct communication framework
An appropriate communication framework is essential for knowledge exchange to take place between experienced resources and those newly taken onboard. Not only that, but transparency in communication can also help new team members learn quickly about your organization's culture, understand the work, deliver the desired results, and work towards the common goals.
Daily scrum meetings can keep projects on track by reiterating the expectations, changes in requirements, scope modifications, and so on. They also help in eliminating any chances of misunderstanding, which often leads to projects going astray.
When the offshore team is in direct communication with you, it can accelerate the pace of work and reduce the turnaround time on deliverables. Consistent and robust communication also enhances the productivity of employees, keeping them in control of projects, while having support when needed.
We also recommend setting up online tools for online communication and collaborations. Get rid of emails and rely on these tools, which also help in maintaining transparency across the organization and keep everyone on the same page.
Tip 3: Measure the performance of resources
Keeping a tab on the performance of your offshore engineering team can be tricky. But, when done properly, this can be the single reason behind the success of the team. It is critical for you, as an enterprise, to maintain accountability when it comes to individuals who are part of your offshore team. Provide regular feedback to help the team understand the expectations and improve accordingly.
Continuously tracking the offshore team members for developments in the project and their work ethics can help you encourage ideal behavior in employees, thereby helping you achieve maximum ROI from your investment.
Tip 4: Retain domain knowledge in the team
Enterprises often have a few core competencies and excel in them alone. Such competencies and domain knowledge help the enterprises in launching new initiatives and diversifying and/or scaling their business.
The teams working on various projects spend a considerable amount of time to understand the domain and project requirements. When you set up your own offshore software development team, ensure that you retain the domain knowledge and expertise of the team that you have developed over a period. Retained domain knowledge can help you accelerate time-to-market for a new product or version when you need specific core expertise, not otherwise available or too expensive to get locally.
Domain expertise retained in your offshore development team can help increase release speed and productivity in dire times of need.
Tip 5: Compensate for distant time zones
Distant time zones, poor communication, and uncertain expectations can undermine any benefits of offshore teams in different countries. This is why everyone involved in such a setting needs to be invested in making the arrangement work.
Time zone differences can mean missed communication, improper tracking of deliverables, and delayed timelines. But, when managed properly, time zone gaps can be bridged – or even used as an advantage. Define the work deliverables and timelines in such a way that the onshore and offshore teams work collaboratively to deliver results faster while ensuring high quality. For example, if your onshore team has developed a module, the offshore team working can test it during a different time zone and keep the bug report ready for the development team to work on it the next day.
Working along with your in-house employees can make the remote team feel like an extended arm of your organization while increasing the pace of development and quickening product delivery.
offshore teams offer an interesting opportunity to any company expanding its operations in newer geographies or wanting to set up centers and delivery units.
Braves Technologies can help you by taking the entire responsibility off your shoulders. We understand your work, help you hire the right resources, build the required infrastructure for them, and also monitor and maintain the team.