Mastering two key business practices ensures the successful management of an offshore team.

At Tech People, we’ve enabled many leading businesses to achieve their development plans through our manged offshore development team. Two key factors that ensure this success:

1.    Making the time zones work for you.

We ensure that everyone starts on the same page. Our clients are well briefed on the differences in time zones, so everyone has the same expectations of working hours. In the initial period we work hard to ensure our remote team overlaps with the local on-shore team’s work hours for as much time as possible.

We schedule multiple video calls with the on-shore team so that the client’s business and project requirements are well understood. In addition we hold technical sessions to guide the remote team through the solution and ensure that we can speedily set up the environment.

We then come to an agreement on a practical time for stand-up and other agile meetings and ensure its sustainable for all parties in the two time-zones. An example of this may be having a twice-weekly stand up meeting as well as daily stand up updates using Slack.

You can also use the time zone to your advantage. For example – let’s say the main product/business in question is based in California, but the main software development was carried-out in New Zealand. You could potentially have a team in two different time zones providing 24/7 support. When carefully planned, you can push a project along even more quickly using people on different sides of the globe.

2.    Ensuring communication between teams is seamless.

Our contractors’ ability to communicate clearly and articulately in written and spoken English, is one of the things that sets Tech People apart. Our team not only require field leading skills, but their English language skills must be exceptional. This ensures nothing is ever lost in translation. It also means that unlike other resources, we don’t need to use translator in between – this keeps the communication and work process efficient.

We New Zealanders also have our own way of communicating. Our turns of phrase and idioms that we use every day often make no sense to anyone else. That’s why our offshore contractors have cultural training in how we work and how Kiwis speak– so that everyone is ‘all good’ with what’s been said at all times.

Are you ready to discuss how our offshore development team can help you realise your next software development project? Get in touch and we’ll show you just what’s possible.