Posts tagged "managing distributed development teams"

Tips to Succeed at Managing Distributed Software Teams

It can be seen that more and more companies offer remote work positions and according to statistics at the moment up to 70 percent of professionals work remotely at least once a week. How is remote work so popular?

Remote workers are 25 percent more productive believe it or not. Unlike their colleagues who work in an office, they do their job more efficiently, are more focused and problem- solving. This is the main reason why companies take this step, after all, who wouldn’t want fast improvement and dedication?

Working on projects from different countries all over the world may be challenging but it is easy. The clients are the most important players in the game and they deserve the best type of services.

Here are some tips from practitioners gathered from their experience when it comes to building and

  1. Hire the right person – Finding the right person sometimes is impossible. It is pricey as well. This is the main reason why a lot of employers seek employees outside their borders. Find qualified developers that will help you achieve your goals. Combine inbound and outbound lead generation and acquisition techniques.

Your company can easily be found by qualified candidates. This can happen only if you implement the inbound strategy. Create your journey, point out what are you looking for and what are you offering. The strategy should look like this:
A high amount of creativity is required here. Look outside the box and do everything in your power. There are millions of ways to gain interest in your company or project so implement correctly all those ways.

Outbound strategy, on the other hand, will inform your present and past candidates about new opportunities and will shorten the search time. In- house recruiting teams usually do not have passage to a large supply of talent but IT staffing agency can help you out.

  1. Initiate Clear Communication Process – Clear communication stands behind every successful team. The main reason why distributed teams fail is inactive and insufficient communication. Use a multi-pronged approach and tools like email, Slack, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype and TeamViewer. Instant messaging, video calls and screen sharing will allow connection and communication between every member thus will make the team stronger. Also, companies should consider project management tools to seal up productivity.
  2. Continuous Integration – Overcoming obstacles can be easy when continuous integration is implemented. Teams can also split their responsibilities more accurately by using this culture. Let’s say that there is a hypothetical situation in which your business has security concerns that will somehow negatively affect development. The situation will require two separate codes that will be later merged. Maintaining two separate codes is not good especially because it will steal you a significant amount of time and resources to fix it. A single code is far better; more secure and will increase the communication within the team. CI tools come in free and paid options. Jenkins, Go CD, GitLab and Codefresh are free while Atlassian Bamboo and TeamCity are paid. Flexibility and functionality are guaranteed after using these.
  3. Measure Performance and Productivity – Measurements can help you keep up and track the work your team is doing and the points which require bigger attention. Product development can significantly increase if the Agile/ Scrum approach is used. In fact, the system is not important as long as you track the key performance indicators. It is not mandatory to measure all of them, measure only the ones which are the most significant to your project and team.
    New teams should start small, two to three metrics and increase in time as the project increases while the mature team can use up to seven metrics. You should remember two important things. Do not go beyond seven because you can experience analysis paralysis and make a collective decision.

A lot of disrupted teams are responsible for a lot of successful development projects. Hiring is quite challenging but it is possible when traditional and innovative ways are used. So, start by connecting with the talent you seek (use the inbound and outbound leads), then after forming your team start communication between every single member and other teams (use CI) and at the end measure the performance and productivity (use KPI’s).

Samsung, Microsoft, Google and a lot of other gigants use and are satisfied by distributed teams from all over the world. Other, small or medium companies should follow the example if they want to embrace innovation better and faster.