Managing Outsourced Teams

Outsourcing has become a quite attractive option for many app development and website development services. After all, compared to an in-house team, outsourcing can turn out to be cheaper. For example, an average rate in the United States of America would be around 168 dollars per hour, whereas, say, an Indian developer would only charge around 26 dollars per hour. As you can see, that’s a major difference.

Not only that but through this method of recruitment you’ve also got access to hidden talents that you might not be able to encounter within your local area. The world is full of talented people, and you just have to know where to look for them. So, we saw what type of advantages can outsourcing bring to your company. However, it’s not all sunshine and buttercups. Outsourcing comes with a major drawback as well, and that is the difficulty of managing an outsourced team.

When managing a remote team, you’re more than likely to face an entire plethora of challenges, such as dealing with different time zones, language barriers, misunderstandings, and you’ll also have less control over what is happening during the development process. So, how can you get over these difficulties? How can you benefit from outsourcing’s full potential? How can you properly manage an outsourced team? Well, hopefully, we are going to give you the answer to that today.

Communication Is Key

This point applies when managing just about any team out there. However, when outsourcing, maintaining constant communication is of the utmost importance. After all, communication is one of the biggest problems you have to face while managing a remote team. Make sure to hold regular meetings, daily if possible, where you can discuss the progress of your project, brief the team on what needs to be done, provide feedback, etc, etc.

Now, in order to make this more efficient, it is often recommended you host video calls. This way, you’ll be able to get closer to your team, thus building trust. Also don’t forget to make use of other communication tools, such as Slack, or Google Hangouts, where the members of the team can easily contact each other at all times.

Establishing Trust

This one goes hand in hand with the communication issue we mentioned earlier. We all know that it’s quite hard to feel empathy towards other people while having a screen standing between you and them. It’s just not the same thing as them being physically present in the conversation. Therefore, you might be colder to them, and vice-versa. You’re not going to have the same level of trust as managing an in-house team, and that will result in more reserved communication.

So, how do you fix this? Well, you basically have to treat them as they were your employees. Take some time and get to know them, talk about some things other than your project. Provide them feedback, offer bonuses, and even congratulate them on some occasions, such as birthdays for example.

Make Use Of Project Management Tools

One more thing you have to do is to use project management software in order to coordinate your team better. There are plenty of tools that help you do just that. Take Trello, for example. This tool allows you to handle workflow, manage deadlines, and much more.