Best Practices When Assembling an Offshore IT Team
Now, more than ever, is the best time to form or strengthen your remote workforce. With the global health crisis still far from being over, sitting things out without doing anything is the perfect recipe for doom. You need to innovate to keep up with the changes brought by the pandemic.
The past year taught us that companies built for the remote operation were not severely shaken when the global marketplace was forced to go on its knee by the health crisis. While other businesses closed down and laid off their workforce, the online business community grew even more robust. If you’re transitioning your operation to go on full remote, then you need to know these best practices from the experts.
Choose a reliable communication system
Whether it’s an offshore IT or Marketing team you’re forming, one thing holds water — you need to have an efficient communication system. If, aside from your remote team, you’ll be maintaining a small group in your headquarters, make sure that both groups share the same communication system. With this, you’ll be assured that no communication between and among team members is missed. Plus, collaboration is made easier when they’re within the same communication system.
It doesn’t matter if the members of your offshore IT team are officially hired or commissioned solely for a single project. They need to coordinate with the rest of the team to make sure that the operation is smooth.
Create a climate that’s respectful to all cultures
The beauty of forming an offshore team lies in removing geographical boundaries when discovering and hiring great talents. One of your teammates may be from Africa, while others may be from Europe, the USA, or Asia. Since you don’t have to relocate physically to work, anyone from different parts of the world with a suitable skill set can be made part of the team. Unfortunately, since your team becomes a melting pot of people with different cultures, discrimination can happen.
It’s the role of leaders like you to ensure that each team member is accorded with respect, regardless of race, gender, skin color, political beliefs, and religious affiliation. You can cultivate this culture by making inclusivity one of your core values. You see, when people feel safe and accepted in their workplace, their productivity and creativity thrive. In the end, you can build an ethical, ideal, and profitable work environment for everyone.
Keep your team down to a manageable level
Let’s face it. It’s hard to manage a team made of more than five people. The more people you need to talk and disseminate information to, the more stressful it is to keep the consensus.
Most people assume that when you have a bigger team, you tend to be more productive. The truth of the matter is, larger teams are less efficient compared to smaller ones. The main reason for this is the fact that the former requires more management and communication. If you have an IT team, you’ll know that most software dev tasks couldn’t be subdivided into chunks for different individuals to finish.
To achieve optimal balance, keep your team to 4 to 5 people. If you go beyond this threshold, you’re risking your efficiency. Besides this, you also need to balance your team size with the knowledge and skills required to complete the sprint backlog successfully.
Designate a senior engineer and technical lead
When you intend to form an IT team, it goes without saying that you need to hire the best developers for backend, frontend, and full-stack development tasks. Aside from that, you also have to ensure that your team members’ technical skills match the requirements of the core services you offer. This suggests that you might need to bring in savvy people in system operations, mobile development, and test systems. You might also need to bring a business analyst, QA tester, project coordinator, and UI/UX Designer on board. If two or three people in your team can assume multiple roles, that’s better.
But apart from these team members, you also need to have at least a senior developer in your team. He is expected to be in the industry for quite some time, enough for him to gain experience on a wide array of IT dev issues. These people can appreciate IT work as a whole. As such, they can better guarantee the entire code base’s quality.
On your end, you also need to have at least one technical lead who can keep tabs on the remote team’s work and progress. They should make sure that the said progress matches the client and company’s technical expectations.
Building an offshore team has its own share of perks and risks. However, if you have the right people with the right skill on board, the risks can be mitigated, while the perks can be magnified.