Project management plays a crucial role in an organization's overall progress. With the heightened competition in modern times, businesses expect project teams to work consistently and at a rapid pace. Only through the best project management practices, your performance can become better, faster, and more reliable. In project management, project managers have the role to plan, organize and manage resources to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the team. The project management institute states that in addition to the applicable technical skills, a project manager needs to possess business management and leadership skills to ensure a project’s success.
In this gig economy, Most software companies today utilize offshore teams of developers to provide a more cost-effective option to clients looking for a solution to programming challenges. Offshore team management comes with its own set of challenges, but can also be worthwhile in ways that can enhance your life as a project manager. We agree that managing a team of developers for an offshore software development project is not a walk in the park. It's even more difficult to manage a team from the other side of the world. In this article, we will try to lay out some of the project administration practices that a project manager should implement when managing offshore resources.
You may also read about the Key Project Management Methodologies
1. Know Your Team & Their Capabilities for offshore team management
Lack of face-to-face communication in teams remains a significant challenge when working with offshore teams. That is where research comes into the picture.
Exercise due diligence: Stop slacking in important matters and do your due diligence. You need to find the best offshore software development outsourcing location for your business and weigh the pros and cons of each location. Weigh in to devise a comprehensible project scope and screen through quotes to set a realistic project budget.
Research the right vendor for the software development model: Connect strings with your preferred target location to scrutinize through recommendations and potential offshore team providers. Evaluate the technical capabilities of vendors through previous client feedback, portfolios, and case studies.
Use outsourcing capabilities smartly: Get better at understanding the individual member's skills when working with offshore teams and utilize them wisely to gain productivity in the work. Defined project scope can additionally help you plan the availability of your team in advance and improve your project administration.
Know the staff assigned for your software development project: Similar to hiring resources in-house you can look at the profiles of the offshore resources assigned for your project. The dedicated team model can be a good idea to build a better look at your team structure.
2. Run Approvals on Your Side
When outsourcing a project to your offshore team you are still responsible for managing the project and that involves a sense of commitment to the project. The project requires inputs from stakeholders in the form of feedback, approvals, and reviews.
Faster client-side approvals: One of the major reasons for poor progress in the project development life cycle is the delays on the client-side. To deal with that, you can assign dedicated project managers for managing offshore teams, to make the project cycle more effective.
Bring practical timelines in the picture: To draw a larger margin between project deadlines, businesses push unrealistic timelines for their offshore teams. This hinders the structured project cycle and the quality of solutions. Clients need to do their due diligence to build practical timelines for managing projects efficiently.
Align stakeholders with the project scope of offshore development: The scope of the project needs to be thorough and detailed. Every query or dispute related to the outsourcing software development to the offshore team and project scope should be resolved in advance to align all the stakeholders. Furthermore, clients need to streamline the decision-making so to reduce any possible delays on the client-side.
3. Organization Commitment
How dedicated are your organization and the individual contributors to support and manage offshore software development? How do you even measure the commitment of the employees or team members? Organizational involvement correlates to the level of association or contribution of an employee to the company and vice versa across the business. In an offshore development team, these need to be considered:
Commit to your offshore team: Extend critical protocols, documentation, requirements, and project management to your offshore team. This ensures alignment and integration across the organization. Make sure that the offshore team more than just sticks to these development practices.
Ask your offshore team to commit to supporting organizational demands such as the readiness to handle tasks beyond regular working hours.
Present a venue for continuous growth, learning, and improvement.
Set a sustainable level of responsibility, engagement, ownership, and a sense of responsibility from your offshore team.
4. Build Partnership and Make it Two-way
Just like any other partnership, the efforts in the outsourcing sector can only be increased when they are made from both ends. And to make efforts reciprocate, agreements need to be made two-way.
Share your vision and goals properly: Share goals, shortcomings, and vision with your offshore team. Promote trust and talk through every detail together to get your remote team on the same page with your in-house team. Building the spirit of ownership among your offshore team will drive them to work hard for you.
Focus on communication with the teams: Communication becomes a key when it comes to making bonds two-way. Daily communications in teams build a better understanding among your in-house team and offshore resources and eventually help align everyone’s efforts. Don't put a hold on your communication or limit it to only chats and email channels, instead use voice and video calls to bring better accuracy over tasks and share ideas. Alternatively, you can also use several online project management tools to improve communication among teams.
Keep aside the idea of a one-time deal, instead, build partnerships: Unlike project-based outsourcing, a dedicated offshore team acts as an expansion to your in-house team. As you employ the offshore team for your tasks, you transfer over your processes and work culture to them and strengthen the partnership. Working with a team over long-term projects helps build up a trust value and understanding that can be used to bring recurring projects to success.
5. Prioritize Intellectual Property protection and Data protection
One of the fundamental aspects of managing offshore projects is protecting the IP and protection against any security breach. According to a PWC survey, 31% of the total businesses surveyed saw some kind of security breach attempt while outsourcing offshore projects.
Some vital security precautions you can take while working with remote teams are:
- Sign a strict NDA that is ideally prepared by an attorney
- Authorized access to systems and project-related data
- Examine the networking monitoring settings
- No off-site access to sensitive client data
- Sign and seal standard data protection policies
6. Choose the Right Engagement Model
The offshore outsourcing model operates on three types of engagement models: Fixed Price, Time & Material, and the Dedicated Team model. Each model comes with perks and limitations, which entertain different businesses differently.
Fixed price model: This model works the best for MVP development and short-term projects. The service provider quotes a fixed price for the project, takes care of offshore software development team billing, and the client gets the project delivered according to the pre-defined project scope. The engagement model is not highly flexible and no major changes in the project scope are considered. When adding anything in the project scope, the extra cost is calculated and the overall project budget is likely to exceed.
Dedicated Team Model: For long-term projects that require the highest level of responsibility and reliability, the dedicated team model is the best choice. The client can create his dedicated offshore team of developers or marketers through the software outsourcing partner. Resources are generally bound under a contract and are responsible to serve the client dedicatedly. Whether it is changing project scope or 24/7 resource availability this model fits the best.
Time & Material Model: The set time & material model includes hiring a shared or part-time resource team from an outsourcing provider on a per hour basis. The client can add new features to the project scope and pay for added hours. This model is flexible but does not have full control over resource availability.
To Summarize
The benefits offshore development offers in terms of cost, scalability, global talent, and reliability are unmatched, but only if a business shows effort in managing teams and projects adequately. For instance, outsourcing software development to India may need resources to be managed with great detail and consideration. A lot of preparation, planning, and commitment during execution will be required. For all that a higher level of commitment, effort, and time is needed.
Evon Technologies is one of those offshore software consulting and custom software development companies in India that has over a decade of experience in providing quality IT outsourcing services across verticals. Headquartered in Dehradun, a Tier-2 city, the standard of living is affordable, making the wages relatively low. It enables us to offer a wide range of end-to-end quality software services at low costs. Please go through our About us section to know more about our business model behind working from Dehradun and our software development team in India. Let's start talking or email your business requirements at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
