How to Manage Remote Developer: An Effective Guide for Business Owners

Businesses are moving towards digital transformation, so the need for skilled professionals like software developers, engineers, quality analysts, software testers, etc., has increased. Further, anyone can be taught hard skills, but soft skills are difficult to coach. One of the most difficult soft skills businesses are always searching for is people management, especially managing remote developers. This becomes even more challenging when development teams are working remotely from offshore locations.

The concept of remote hiring is not new to the IT industry. Big IT firms always consider outsourcing or subcontracting some of their IT projects to other IT firms. Technology has made machines communicate with each other on a real-time basis, and thus the concept of hiring remote developers or offshore teams has been gaining popularity.

Let's understand;

Why Businesses Outsource Their Work To Remote IT Outsourcing Companies?

Many entrepreneurs, including the big tech giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and others, praise the merit of having remote engineers or dedicated software development teams or offshore software development outsourcing companies to share and manage the takes. There is always a curiosity that why would one company give their work to others? But there are strategic reasons behind that.

Curb Expenses

When you have a project to outsource and want to hiring remote developers is the most cost-efficient way to proceed you ought to know how to hire remote developers to work on your project. On the contrary hiring an in-house team can be costly affair, as you need to spend good bucks on infrastructure, human resources, tools, and technologies.

Also, the more people you have in-house, the more budget you need to manage them. So instead of hiring more developers, businesses consider outsourcing or hiring remote developers from reputed software development firms. It helps them save big bucks over the project they have.

Meet specific project requirements

It isn't easy to get all things in one place, and so happens with business project development as well. At times a particular project may need a programming language for which they do not have relevant developers.

Further, such projects being variable in nature, it is not feasible to go for a full-time resource, so businesses consider hiring a team of developers remotely from bespoke software development company.

Attract diversified talent

At times, it becomes difficult to hire developers locally for specific projects and thus businesses are now open to hiring teams from offshore locations. Some projects require special expertise and hiring them locally can be costly while hiring remote team offshore can save big on your business budget. This provides them access to good talent and also saves the cost and hassle of recruiting.

The above is definitely not the exhaustive list of reasons for hiring remote developers or subcontracting but it gives an understanding of the main reasons why, as a business, you should hire remote developers.

Top Tips to Manage Remote Developers

Now as difficult as it is to hire dedicated remote developers, so is to manage them but having a good work plan and the correct tools can help business organizations to do so effectively. Following the below guidelines can help you manage your remote team effectively.

Identify the team size you need

The other day while scrolling over LinkedIn, I came across a great quote that TCS is using to save food wastage. It said, Take all you can eat, but eat all you take. Never go for excess. Excess of anything is wrong.

The same is applicable while considering the size of the team of developers. Make sure you hire only as many as you need for any project. Plan the number of dedicated resources or developers you need for your project and hire them. The bigger your remote development team size, the more difficult it will be to get them in sync.

Effective Communication

Communication is the key to effective management of any work. Ensure you communicate your requirements, expectations, and timelines with your team of remote developers. They should know what the project is about, what matters in it, and what is expected of them to complete the project successfully.

Further, the daily tasks should be identified and communicated to the remote developers that you have hired so that they are aware that each day ends with what they need to submit. If the dedicated remote developers team does not communicate properly, the project may go astray and thus leading to failure of delivery.

Have daily stand-ups

Stand-ups are one such effective meet-up for team of remote developers where everyone shares quick progress about their tasks and the next thing they have on their plate. Stand-ups should be quick where developers working remotely can share their hiccups, or if there is any showstopper that is not allowing them to proceed, they can share.

Plan regular meetings

Besides quick short catch-ups with your dedicated developers, it is essential to plan for regular 30 to 60 minutes meetings depending on your agenda. This is where you can deepen your rapport with the team of developers working remotely for you and provide them with any solution they need to take their work ahead effectively.

Further, always make sure that you conclude the meetings so that everyone is on the same page.

Using Project Management Tools (PMT)

There are so many project management tools available in the market that help businesses effectively manage dedicated offshore or remote developers—various PMTs help control actions like managing the daily tasks of teams.

Tools called JIRA and Trello are popularly used to identify the tasks remote teams are working on and also see the owner of the same. Further, with each job completed, the ticket is closed with good comments from the remote developers or the respective owner.

Another important thing we discussed above was communication; we have various options for that as well. Project management tools like Slack are used for communication between the onsite and offshore teams.

Another popular platform is Skype which supports instant calling, messaging, video calling, and screen sharing options. Although there are other options, the above are some of them that are widely used.

Respect Geographical limitations

Every business ultimately is by the people, and for the people, so it is essential to respect the time zones of your dedicated remote developers. Man is a social animal, so we must respect their personal space and offer some flexibility to work according to their time zone. Almost all businesses have some standard work hours where they all can easily connect, so it is crucial to identify that and offer some leverage.

Final Thoughts

Finally, Hire dedicated remote developers and manage them without too much difficulties by considering above mentioned pointers. There are definitely some other new work methods coming up, like adopting Agile Scrum methodology; it becomes even more smooth to keep the dedicated or remote developers teams in line with the overall project objective and utilize the same as an extended arm of your in-house developers teams.