One of the early parts of the viability of the digital transformation project was to find an offshore team and to provide suitable software technology solutions. However, if there were no key linkages provided by the offshore work’s subsequent stages, these below steps would become useless. One of the linkages is dependent on the ability to communicate and interact between service delivery personnel and enterprise personnel.
There are thousands of offshore software development centers all over the world. How can you find the suitable one that gives you the technology as well as relevant knowledge that you need within your budget?
Working effectively requires effort from both parties involved in cooperating with an offshore software development team. It creates various challenges such as differences in culture, communication problems, different time zones, as well as task management… As a result, this article will help you to make the suitable decision to select a partnership. In addition, this post also goes through 8 steps to work effectively with an offshore development team. Check them now!
What is an offshore team?
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An offshore team is understood as an extended development team established overseas to work on a software development project. The company in the offshore position will offer facilities. In addition, this team also assists in acquiring, mentoring, and monitoring high-quality resources to bring the best productivity. This team plays a role as an extension of the IT team to fast-track projects.
For example, your company is based out of the USA and developing a software solution. You wish to reduce the time-to-market of your company to gain the advantage of the first movers. Hiring an offshore team in developing countries like India, Ukraine, and Vietnam could be the best solution to achieve your goal without much cost. These nations provide a pool of massive talent in the technology industry. In addition, those developing countries can lower living costs. This leads to lower infrastructure and labor costs. Also, governments in those countries issue policies toward FDI to attract foreign investment.
How to choose a suitable offshore team?
Before moving to 8 steps to work successfully with an offshore team, you should know how to choose the right team to cooperate with. It is an integral part that decides whether your project result is good or not. Below are some key elements that you need to consider before going to commit with an offshore group.
Your expectation
Most of the companies do not remember to find out their expectations. They rush to find a partner without knowing what they expect to achieve. As a result, they can get nowhere on the defined development road.
Before you begin to look for an offshore development partner, you should take time to sit down and discuss with your team. This process is to clarify your goals and what do you expect to gain from the offshore group. The output of the meeting will be an outline of your business team’s specific expectations and details.
Whether you define short-term or long-term aims, it always comprises detailly existing issues, your company’s internal resources, your budget, the size of the team, offshore’s models, technology, skills… The preparation of them will support you to identify your potential partners and know-how suitable the offshore company is for your company’s business goals.
Besides, a comprehensible goal will give the offshore development providers the most suitable software solutions within your budget. It is highly recommended that a reliable offshore development team, who have a strong base in this aspect, can provide the best solution to help your company gain more benefits.
All in all, you shall be the host. Therefore, be careful when preparing the proposal as it brings a clear overview of your expectations. And after that, it will become easier to reach your business’s defined goals.
Their tech stacks and experience
The defined goals will be the roadmap to show what you need. And the experience of the offshore software development team is one of the important criteria. You must research your partner’s portfolios and the projects that they have done recently. By doing this, you will have a deep understanding of their abilities, working skills, successes in the past, and domain knowledge.
After that, you can narrow down the lists of suitable partners to choose the most potential partner for your offshore project. There are three believable sources for you to find partners that you should consider. Firstly, it is from referencing from your colleagues in the same field. Secondly, you can directly ask the company. Finally, it is to search the detailed information of their case studies on the website. Those case studies will be proof to show whether they can solve your problems or not.
Their tech stacks and experience
Besides the experience, their technical expertise will be another factor that you should consider. If you are working with technological expertise, it will provide you with the best outcomes. You will know the necessary stacks, potential partners, and their ability to do the project based on your demands and requirements.
Cost optimization
Cost optimization is another part that you need to bear in mind when choosing a partner. We recommend that you should select a flexible offshore development team that offers different prices and support you to choose the one that is suitable for your goals. In that way, you can gain the pricing model that is the most affordable price within your budget.
There are three common types of pricing models in offshore software development companies:
- The fixed-price model: this model will work best for small and medium projects with defined requirements.
- The dedicated development group model: this means that you hire an offshore development provider that is entirely concentrated on your project.
- The time and material model: it is suitable for a temporary project.
However, in the situation that the offshore vendors offer you attractive prices, you must place quality as the top priority. Low prices should not be the primary factor when you choose a vendor. An ideal offshore center will ensure both competitive prices and quality software projects.
Their customer’s reviews and testimonials
In the situation that you have no experience in choosing offshore software development centers, you should take their former user experience and testimonials into consideration.
It is undeniable that you need to have extensive research to choose the most suitable partner. You can ask for recommendations from your friends, colleagues, or those who have experienced this service. It is a safe source for your references as you did not have experience with this company. Therefore, you will know which one is reliable for offshore projects.
In addition, you need to look into social media and the Internet or even look at the testimonials on their websites. When you surf social media or the Internet, you can find more information about the software development center and your friend who had experienced their offshore project. Then, you can ask them for recommendations and give quality feedback on whether you should choose this provider or not.
Trustpilot is a Danish consumer review website established in 2007. It is known as one of the top customer review management tools that supports you to find trustworthy businesses. If you are a consumer needing to read some reviews in a review platform before cooperating with a company for the first time, Trustpilot can be worth checking out. Until now, BSS Commerce has had 649 excellent reviews on this website due to quick response and good customer support.
=> FIND more information about BSS Commerce at:
Security policy
Currently, when cooperating with a third-party company, you have to share copyright information and your user data. Therefore, you should have some standards and regulations to secure your data. Nowadays, almost all reliable offshore teams have established their security policy. It is to ensure that their data shall not be in trouble.
Therefore, before committing to a partnership with an offshore development team, you should have to double-check if your future partner has the security policies or not. This will assure the security and safety of your confidential information. A trustworthy agency will offer you an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to protect your privacy at all costs.
=> CLICK here to know more about why you should choose a suitable offshore center:
https://bsscommerce.com/blog/offshore-development-center-speed-up-business-growth/
8 effective steps to work with an offshore team
After knowing how to choose a reliable offshore software development center, you should go through the 8 steps below to work successfully with an offshore development team.
Applying Agile methodology in project management
First of all, you should have an approach to work with an offshore software development team. We highly recommend you to use the Agile approach. With this methodology, the development team can find more effective and efficient methods to establish software by providing a clear structure. They are encouraged to be iterative development, team corporations, and concentration on efficiency and productivity. Currently, Agile methodology has become widely utilized due to its simple and successful framework for development and ability to provide value to their customers quicker.
Applying Agile methodology in project management
The most outstanding advantage of this approach is the client involvement. It can be understood as the emphasis on the role of the client in the entire stages of the project. One of the primary advantages of this methodology is to adjust and modify at any point based on the input from clients and the market conditions.
Although there are many development methodologies, the Agile development methodology is the common selection of many companies. Because it can deal with complex projects. In addition, it also creates flexibility during the process of software development.
Below are some key features of Agile:
- Ability to deliver new features regularly.
- Ability to introduce and adapt to new features in the short run.
- Quality improvement by regular testing, detecting, and fixing defects early.
- Reducing the costs and time for predictability as Agile allows the offshore development team to have a quite exact estimation about how long it will take to develop a new feature. Beyond that, it can support you to predict costs and time because of the firm number of working hours in each sprint.
Identifying a strategic vision for the project
After coming to Agile and partnering with an offshore development center, it is really necessary to identify the strategic vision for the project. Specifically, you should clarify the number of tasks that must be done by a defined date before working on the project. You should develop and present a thorough strategy to the team as a detailed picture of the whole project. In addition, you should include all information that the team is asked to give such as deadlines, reports, and timetables.
Planning release campaign in detail
You also need to divide the scope of work into different time periods to create a detailed development plan. On the roadmap, you need to get a picture of what you need to clarify the product vision. Thus based on the speed of the whole process, the demand of users and other external factors, timelines, and functionality can be various. All members of the offshore team will have the ability to access the whole image of the process for project development at all times. It is necessary for them to have a deep understanding of the schedule of the process in detail.
Conducting regular meetings
An ideal method to communicate with each other is to keep track of each other’s problems and activities. In addition, you can conduct meetings to access the demo version. Regularly organized at the end of each iteration, a demo is proof of the team’s results. The product owner or the project manager should give input to the team and ensure that it is documented in the presentation of the demo report. It is essential for both parties to determine the positive and negative points of the final iteration and develop solutions for those points.
Using appropriate collaboration platforms
Nowadays, applications have become more and more popular thanks to the development of offshore work such as Zoom, Trello, Google Meeting… The offshore development center and the product owners can use the appropriate cooperation platforms. Instead of sitting together in a room, these technological platforms can keep everyone on the same page despite variances in locales and time zones.
Using appropriate collaboration platforms
Moreover, to maintain a long-term relationship with your partner and to establish mutual trust between the two parties of the software development process, we should communicate with your offshore teams by setting up online meetings using popular communication applications like Skype, Whatsapp,…
Ensuring seamless working process
Besides understanding the partner company, you are responsible for sharing information with the offshore partner about your own goals. When the offshore team begins working, they will have the comfortable and welcoming feeling as actual members rather than a hired partner. It is because both parties have a mutual understanding’s organizational structure, working process, and products.
Therefore, you should maintain working with your selected offshore development team to assure a seamless workflow without interruptions by sharing your own company’s goals, detailed requirements from the beginning to the launch day.
Communicating with team members
It is important to notice that you should not assign a task and hide it for a long period before checking it out. Maybe, setting up daily meetings for the team is difficult and time-consuming for you. However, it is hard to make sure that the project is going as scheduled.
Communicating with team members
Alternatively, your offshore team can gradually lose concentration on your project as they think that you do not care about the development of the project. Thus, you should have daily talks related to the development of the project. In addition, you should conduct a morning meeting on a daily basis before the offshore development partners begin work to summarize and describe what they have done the day before, what difficulties they are facing, and how they addressed those difficulties today.
Giving queries or recommendations in a positive manner
Finally, no one wants to be micromanaged in their working process. Maybe some things can not be right for you, but in the perspective of the engineers, it is an important part of the process to ensure the success of the project in the future. Thus, you should give queries and recommendations positively to make sure that your engineers will feel appreciated.
=> FIND more detail about the Top 12 offshore development teams in Vietnam:
https://bsscommerce.com/blog/top-offshore-development-team-in-vietnam/
BSS Commerce – a trustworthy offshore development center
With over nine-year experience in eCommerce, BSS Commerce is confident to make sure that our company is a perfect choice for any business of any scale. We have served over 21,000 customers all over the world and we have completed over 500 successful projects.
When choosing BSS Commerce as an offshore development center, we will benefit you from affordable cost, effective time management, and growth opportunities. There will be no wasting time on recruitment and training as we are specialized in solving every difficult task. Moreover, we can offer you a cost-effective solution and time-efficient support. BSS also confirms to bring you exceptional services without hassle on the quality of deliverables. Therefore, you can remove risks and accelerate the output with our modern strategic consultation and technological maintenance.
=> FIND more about our offshore development center:
https://bsscommerce.com/offshore-development-center.html
Let’s leave your project for our experts and you will have a wonderful experience when working with us.
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