Remote Development
11 proven tips to manage your offshore team – challenges, tools, and expert advice
Learn effective strategies for managing offshore teams, from communication to quality control. Plus, get our recommended tools and solutions to common challenges in offshore development.
Earlier this year, we onboarded a client for offshore software development. They shared how management challenges with previous outsourcing partners had delayed their launch by 6 months.
This experience, which is recurring in many of our offshore-familiar clients, shows how effective management of offshore teams can be the difference between project success and failure.
If you’re new to outsourcing or looking to optimize your offshore team, here are our 11 proven management tips.
What is offshore software development?
Offshore software development is a business process where a company outsources some or all of its software development to partner companies located in another country.
Reduced cost, access to a global talent pool, easy scaling, and faster time-to-market are some of the major benefits of hiring an offshore team. To learn more about benefits, visit our guide on the benefits of hiring an offshore team.
11 Tips to Manage Your Offshore Teams
Let’s first understand why these management tips matter.
Our experience shows that most offshore partnerships fail not due to technical skills but because of ineffective management practices. The wrong approach can lead to missed deadlines, quality issues, and frustrated teams on both sides.
Having helped numerous clients overcome their offshore challenges, we’ve compiled a list of proven management tips for key areas that directly impact project success.
Communication and Cultural Integration
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – no matter how well thought your strategy is, you will never get outsourcing right without a collaborative culture.
Establish clear time overlap windows
Offshore development projects succeed when teams maintain at least 3-4 hours of overlap daily. To make the best of the overlapping hours,
- Schedule key meetings during these hours.
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Use tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for asynchronous updates.
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Create a shared calendar marking each team member’s working hours and availability.
Build a culture of open communication
Language barriers often create misunderstandings. Set up daily check-ins and encourage team members to ask questions, no matter how small.
Document all discussions in simple, clear language: We’ve found that teams using templates for updates and maintaining meeting minutes have fewer misunderstandings.
Integrate teams culturally
You need to include your offshore members in company events, even if it’s virtual. Creating a separate channel for casual conversation and celebrating team achievements will make the team feel connected.
You can also plan regular visits to your offshore location when possible. This helps build trust, which you can’t achieve through virtual meetings alone.
Project Management and Visibility
Establish a system and mechanisms where everyone involved can overview or know the project’s progress at any given time. With the right offshore development partner, like Proshore, you can also leverage their existing system.
Maintain project visibility
Use project management tools like Jira to track progress in real time. You can ask teams for daily updates with specific metrics – tasks completed, roadblocks faced, and upcoming deliverables.
Also, ensure that dashboards are shared with stakeholders for transparency. This helps identify potential delays before they impact deadlines.
Performance tracking
You need clear metrics to evaluate your offshore team’s work quality and progress. Track things like sprint velocity, code quality scores, and meeting deadlines.
This helps you make data-driven decisions to improve team performance.
Integrate teams culturally
You need to identify potential risks early when working with offshore teams. Things like communication gaps, resource constraints, and technical issues can impact your project.
Always have a backup plan ready – like having extra resources on standby or alternative communication channels.
This ensures your project stays on track even when challenges arise.
Technical Quality Management
Setting a structure and pre-defined standards will go a long way, especially when managing an offshore team that scales alongside your product.
Developer onboarding
You must create a structured onboarding process for new offshore team members. Have a clear checklist covering technical setup, project context, and coding practices.
This helps new developers become productive faster and maintains consistent development standards across the team.
Prioritize knowledge documentation
You must create a centralized knowledge base covering technical decisions, architecture diagrams, and coding guidelines. This will reduce knowledge gaps and ensure consistent understanding across the team.
And, if there are any important meetings regarding project direction, you can record them and make them accessible to all team members.
Set clear quality standards
You must define and document your coding standards from the start. For consistent coding practices, you can try regular peer review sessions to discuss code improvements.
And, for quality QA, you can implement
- Rigorous QA processes
- Regular code reviews
- Automated testing
Legal and Compliance
Safeguard your product and party – prevention is better than cure.
Legal requirements
You need clear contracts that outline project scope, timelines, and quality standards.
Get legal experts to help with compliance, especially for data protection and IP rights.
Data security
You will definitely need a clear data security protocol when working with your offshore team. For secure project management,
- Set up secure access controls and VPN for remote connections
- Implement encryption standards for all communications
- Create clear guidelines for handling sensitive information.
Need a ready-to-code dev team for your project?
Hire offshore devs from Proshore. Let's discuss your requirements
Tool for effective management of offshore teams
When managing offshore teams, you need the right tools to keep everything running smoothly. Here’s our recommended toolkit based on different management needs:
Common challenges with managing offshore teams
Even with proper management practices in place, you might face certain challenges with your offshore team. Here are common issues we’ve seen clients encounter:
How Proshore helps to manage your offshore teams
Best practices and using the right tools are one way of managing offshore teams. However, to succeed, you need experience, proven systems, and a partner who understands your challenges firsthand.
At Proshore, we provide a complete ready-to-code development framework that takes all your pain of managing offshore development and ensures the project’s success.
Our approach comes from years of helping clients overcome common offshore development hurdles while delivering successful projects.
Here’s how we put our experience to work for you:
We eliminate time zone and language barriers through
- A dedicated scrum master who takes ownership of agile development and communication.
- Clear communication channels for different needs.
- Detailed documentation of every decision made.
- Structured daily updates to keep you informed.
We offer quality ready-to-code devs from day 1
- Build and scale your team from a pool of 5,000+ vetted developers.
- Automated testing from the start.
- 60-day trial period for you to build your trust while we build your product.
- Project-based development for projects with clear requirements and scope.
- Dedicated team model for long-term projects with evolving requirements.
- Staff augmentation when you need to quickly scale your existing team.
Want to focus on your core business without the hassle of managing an offshore team? We will handle your development needs with our proven management system – let's get started.