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Remote software development teams are more in demand than ever before. As businesses transition into the digital world, providing online services, many opt to partner with remote development teams. While doing so comes with a plethora of benefits, from high flexibility to increased cost-effectiveness, it also comes with several challenges.
For example, not all businesses transitioning to the digital world are aware of the software development process or how to effectively manage a remote software development team. To take full advantage of remote development teams, it’s essential that you understand key development and management processes.
Fortunately, you’ve found your way to this guide, where we present nine effective tips for managing a remote software development team.
What Is a Remote Development Team?
A remote development team refers to a group of individuals who work together from different locations to develop software and applications. Remote development teams utilize digital communication and project management tools to operate as if working side by side. For instance, communication tools like Zoom and Google Hangout allow for face-to-face meetings regardless of proximity. Meanwhile, project management tools like ClickUp facilitate smooth business processes and operations.
Since the COVID-19 lockdowns, many industries have shifted towards remote working–this is especially true for software development. In fact, nearly 40% of software engineers will now only work remotely. Therefore, the chances are, if you’re looking to hire a software development team, you’ll need to consider working with a remote agency.
9 Practical Tips for Managing a Remote Software Developers
If you’re not used to working with a remote software development team, it may take some getting used to. In fact, you may need to update your existing management practices to ensure they’re suitable for remote workers. Below, we’ve listed 9 practical steps you can take when managing remote software developers.
Clearly Communicate Job Roles
The effective management of a remote development team starts before the project begins by clearly defining and assigning job roles. While this may seem obvious, it’s not uncommon for employees to drift in and out of areas of responsibility unnecessarily. For example, you may find a graphic designer writing web page headlines while designing instead of leaving it for the team’s copywriter.
Generally, this responsibility creep occurs as a result of unclear responsibilities and processes. You should take time to outline job responsibilities, assign them to appropriate workers, and make it clear to the whole team who is responsible for what. This will result in better collaboration between your team members as they will have a clearer understanding of the overall workflow.
Encourage Regular and Open Communication
In a remote working environment, you can’t simply get up, walk across the room, and talk to your colleagues. However, remote work has revolutionized the way we communicate with one another at work. With the tools discussed in the next section, you can contact team members from anywhere at any time, making communication easy.
Positive communication is still the cornerstone of any successful remote development project, regardless of the method used. In fact, 86% of employees and executives blame poor communication and collaboration as the main reason for failure. As a result, you should encourage regular and open communication among team members and management. For example, you may leverage group messaging channels to enable transparency and enforce daily progress reports from each team member.
Leverage Project Management and Communication Tools
In order to ensure positive and effective communication among your remote development team, there are several tools you can adopt including both project management and communication software. Leveraging such software will allow you to enjoy effective, convenient, and transparent communication between your team members.
Some tools you may consider implementing include:
- Slack: Slack is an enterprise-level messaging application that allows your team members to private message, video and audio call, send documents, and chat in public channels.
- Google Hangouts: This is Google’s video chatting platform that allows your team members to enjoy face-to-face meetings with multiple people.
- ClickUp: ClickUp is a project management tool that can help your business to efficiently organize and monitor tasks.
- Asana: Asana is a similar tool to ClickUp but is better suited to smaller software development projects.
As well as leveraging the above communication tools, it’s also essential that you schedule regular meetings. This may be with individual team members to review their progress and listen to concerns or company-wide group meetings. Either way, conducting regular remote meetings helps keep your team members on track and focused on a mutual goal.
Embrace Asynchronous Communication
Remote teams often consist of individuals from different countries, meaning that time zones may present further communication challenges. For example, while your project manager might be asleep, your lead developer is working on your project, so the two can’t communicate directly.
This is where asynchronous communication comes into play, facilitating effective communication and task management at all times. Asynchronous communication is an always “off approach” to communication where you assume that your colleagues are not reachable and make considerations accordingly.
For example, you might record a video explaining your thoughts on a new feature addition using Loom, instead of expecting a live call. You might also create and assign ClickUp tasks to team members who are offline to be completed the following day.
Set Clear Expectations
As your team members will be coming and going at different times throughout the day, it’s important to specify what you expect from them. For example, what tasks should they complete, and what is the deadline for completion? You might also consider requiring a certain level of communication, such as periodical notifications reporting on their tasks.
One way you can set clear expectations is by providing employees with SMART goals:
- Specific: You should create specific goals focused on individual tasks and responsibilities. This keeps employees on track when there are higher priorities.
- Measurable: How can you track your employee’s progress? In other words, is the goal you’re setting tangible?
- Achievable: Goals should be reasonable. It’s better to set small, achievable goals than unobtainable large goals.
- Relevant: When setting a goal for your employee, they must be relevant to their job role and responsibilities.
- Time-Based: It’s important to set a completion deadline. Otherwise, the goal will be hard to measure and will likely take longer than needed.
Setting clear expectations ensures that you and your team are on the same page, meaning that you’re less likely to find your project going off at a tangent.
Encourage and Facilitate Continuous Learning
Providing training resources and standardized working frameworks, from project management processes to your expected quality assurance practices is essential. Doing so will allow your whole team to work to the same high standard, leaving less room for error and inconsistencies.
Training material can be delivered through platforms such as Udemy or by creating your own company or project Wiki. However, if you’d rather keep it simple, sharing resources through email is also a viable option.
Embracing Agile Methodology
This methodology is a dynamic part of the software development life cycle, focusing on continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the project life. Instead of focusing on building a project as a whole, developers focus on each component and feature, dedicating resources and testing to smaller components. These are then integrated into the wider project.
The benefits of an Agile development approach include:
- A 25% increase in productivity
- Improved speed and flexibility
- Better cost control
- Testing at each iteration
- Better quality control
Agile methodology is an especially good choice for projects with evolving requirements as it allows developers to make planning changes on the fly.
Focus on Outcomes, Not Activity
Tracking individual team member’s work and productivity while working remotely is a challenge that all remote businesses face. How do you hold your team accountable when they are free to come and go as they please? While there are some time tracking tools available, such as Scrin.io, it’s better to put greater emphasis on outcomes, not activity.
By focusing on the work your team produces during their working day, it creates an environment that encourages productivity and quality. For instance, if your team can work less, but get paid the same, they are more likely to push for task completion instead of filling hours. Not only does this highlight that you value your employees’ time and skills, but it also means you can deliver your project faster.
Provide Regular Feedback
Part of the positive communication environment that you’ll need to create for remote software development success is providing regular feedback to your team members. You should frequently review your team’s work and identify areas for improvement, then work with them to create a reasonable roadmap on how to achieve higher standards.
Feedback from your team members is also a valuable resource, helping you to identify ways that you can improve your management processes.
Final Thoughts on Managing Remote Software Developers
You may have noticed that there is a common thread running through all of the above tips: quality communication. However, maintaining exceptional communication with a whole team of developers is challenging. So, why not enjoy the benefits of growing your remote software development team while only having to talk to one person?
At Idea Maker, we specialize in bespoke software services and have a team of expert developers ready to bring your project to life. A project manager will be assigned to you from our experienced team who will handle communication with developers. Schedule a free consultation with us today to get started.