How To Make Offshore Development Successful For Your Team

Communication – You know what you want. You know there are great developers halfway around the globe who can deliver what you want on the budget and timeline you need. You just don’t know how to get them to do it, what with linguistic barriers, time zone differences, and varied cultural approaches to the collaboration process getting in the way. These problems, if not addressed by having effective communication channels and practices in place, will eat away all of the cost and time savings outsourcing is supposed to bring. Communication with our offshore developers should involve three major features.

Onshore Management for Offshore Devs
There’s simply no replacement for project leaders that share your culture, your language, and your timezone (or are at most only a few hours off). When management knows, in unequivocal terms, what the deliverables are and when they need to be delivered, the project flows more smoothly. You want to outsource your development, not your control or your awareness. A US-based project manager or management team will keep you informed and keep your development on track while allowing you to speak directly with your development personnel as needed. This split gives you the skill and savings on one hand and the confidence and ease of communication on the other—the best of both worlds.

Clear Communication Processes for All Project Members
Everyone makes assumptions. Without them, we’d spend way too much time clarifying obvious details and micromanaging—or being micromanaged. Of course, assumptions vary from culture to culture, so sometimes greater clarity is needed. And any project that involves multiple teams working separately but in tandem needs excellent communication processes in place to sort out the easily-handled assumptions from those that need to be checked, and to do the checking. Clear expectations for all communications, from daily standups to demos of key milestones to sprint goals, will keep your project’s rhythm flowing and keep your development cycle turning smoothly.

Long-Term Relationships with Your Outsourcing Team
Nothing beats experience, and the longer a partnership lasts the more seamless and reliable it becomes. You get to know the ins and outs of working together, and both you and your developers are able to get more value out of the collaboration. Though you might only have short-term or intermittent needs for an offshore development team, there are ways you can tap into the power of long-term relationships. Zibtek’s team brings US-based project managers and leaders together with a dedicated team of offshore developers, some of whom we’ve been working with for over 14 years. We know our team personally, we’re onsite with them regularly, and together we’ve completed over thirty MVPs in the past 18 months alone. Building the right communication with your offshore, outsourced developers can take time, or you can have it up and running in minutes with Zibtek. Get in touch and see how else we can make your outsourcing efforts more successful.