Using a team offshore could help save money and time, provided it’s used effectively. Managing and developing a team that’s located hundreds or thousands of miles from your location is easier said than done, even in this age of technology and myriad communication tools. The following tips shall help with offshore team development.

Inform and Educate

Furnish as much information you could to members of your offshore team. Enlighten them about client company, their expectations and business. Enunciate the benefits the project would offer to the client. Impart as much pertinent information possible about the project to the offshore team members, since they are completely cut out from the place of action. Seeing the impact of their efforts on the business can be highly rewarding to team members.

Communicate

Know the members of your offshore team better and get familiarized with their weaknesses and strengths. Don’t assume the offshore team is bound to implement the project to your exact requirements. Lack of proper communication and coordination could lead to a stressed working environment and a half-baked offering, which could be mitigated if you clearly communicate your design and requirements. Get them involved in your brainstorming sessions and seek their ideas and feedback about process improvements. Emails with screenshots or visual aids must be widely used during solution development. Email communication also helps extract daily progress status from the team. Conducting meetings daily through phone or video conferencing tools helps discuss and clarify design or requirement gaps.

Review and Test

Implement a weekly review and peer review process on the code portion completed. This is important to make sure the solution implemented meets design specifications and other requirements. Also, it helps with identifying and tracking unhandled corner cases, security and developer bugs. Challenge them with friendly competition to detect bugs. Unit testing and integrating carried out as an aspect of the development phase must be documented properly. Locating and addressing defects early ensures the offshore team development comes up with an enhanced code.

Recognize and Incentivise

Recognition and team-building are two sides of the same coin. And if the recognition originates from on-site, it is even more significant. At each milestone, congratulate offshore team members via email, copying all teams involved and senior managers. Identify and implement reward-giving practices, which include spot recognizing offshore team members for each task done well. As these get counted in their appraisal or performance reviews that’s directly correlated to their bonus and promotion, the motivated team would work harder and better. Another way to reward consistent offshore team members is letting them know their prospects of transitioning to onshore from offshore.