How to Effectively Develop Your Software with an Offshore Team

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Potado
  • Date Published
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  • Reading Time 6-Minute Read

Developing your software offshore with a company in a different country can increase your access to skilled developers and cut costs.

Developing software is a complicated procedure, no matter the type of procedure we are talking about. We are talking about a procedure filled with a high number of categories that need to be addressed and it takes a lot of time before a final product is presented in front of the customers.

Naturally, this means that the team who works on a certain project should be educated and experienced enough for the project to be as good as it needs to be. In the last two decades, we can see that the shortage of engineering talent has become quite a big problem in the western part of the world as become acute.

Therefore, the need for hiring a foreign workforce has become a reasonable solution for companies to address the needs of their projects. Of course, there are numerous, let’s say, levels of every project. So, this doesn’t mean that you should hire someone to work on the whole project. Instead, you can hire someone to work on some parts of the project.

Today, we want to talk about the ways you can efficiently develop your software by hiring a foreign team.

Come Up With the Plan

Before you can delegate the parts of the project to an offshore development center, you need to come up with a working plan, and then you should look for the parts of the procedure your members of the staff cannot address. When you determine what elements can be completed with your employees, then you can start looking for a foreign team.

A crucial part of the working plan is determining what sort of software you want to develop, what’s the budget for the whole project, and what are functions you want to add to the software in question. At the same time, creating this one ensures you will be able to avoid unnecessary costs and time waste.

Of course, if there are a couple of these segments that require you to hire foreign experienced professionals, then you shouldn’t shy from hiring more than just one team. Of course, we want to say that communication with a couple of teams at the same time might be challenging, but it doesn’t mean it is impossible to overcome it.

Team Structure

We’ve mentioned previously that communication is an essential element in making the project work. Before it is possible for you to create team cohesion and build up the work procedure, you should address one important question. We are talking about creating the team structure, by delegating the roles to every member of the team.

First, you need to create a team that will work solely on the front-end activities of the project. For those who don’t know what this is, we are referring to the professionals who are experienced with creating the outlook of the app that needs to correlate with the back-end segment of the app.

At the same time, the back end is a team that focuses on creating the functionality of the app. Both of these teams should have a team leader, who is responsible for the results that need to be achieved over a certain time. They are responsible for delegating work and they will ultimately present the project after it is finished.

The Recruitment Process

Gathering the team is probably the most important part, and the companies need to pay close attention to it. Of course, it is unreasonable to hire someone just because that person is claiming to have the needed expertise in a certain field of work. Instead, the recruitment process should include tests that determine whether someone is competent enough to hire or not.
At the same time, being competent is not the only thing the applications should be judged enough. Since we are talking about the foreign workforce, it is important to pay attention to communication. Communicating with the team that is responsible for handling the part of the project is essential.

What are the Benefits?

The most important benefit of utilizing this procedure is a vast space for innovation. People from different parts of the world have different perspectives on how a certain issue should be addressed, and this is a great way to experience this benefit down the road.

The next benefit is cost-effectiveness, which is one of the main points when companies decide to utilize this approach. Hiring dozens of people to work for the company requires paying their salaries and bonuses. By outsourcing a part of the project, companies can save that money and invest it in more important parts of the project.

The final one we want to point out is for companies to be able to focus on more urgent matters and leave the team with the creative freedom to address the task at hand. That way, companies will focus on core activities, like those that are important for ensuring the company’s growth or handling work on some other important projects out there.

What are the Challenges?

When it comes to the main challenges of this approach that require your attention, the most obvious one is working with teams who live in different time zones. That fact can disrupt the coordination and cause a lot of misunderstandings if this question is not addressed properly.

The next one that’s closely tied to the one we’ve mentioned is the delivery delays. Every experienced manager will tell you that delivery delays should be expected, but it is a work of art to minimize them as much as possible. To do that, the company should use some management software, which is pretty popular in this day and age.

The Bottom Line

Outsourcing software development has gained momentum in the last couple of years as people are starting to see the benefits more clearly. We can see that it has offered a chance for numerous companies to grow and enter foreign markets seeking the talent they lack in their native ones. Here, we’ve described some of the most important points regarding software development by hiring an offshore team of professionals. We are sure our readers will find this article of ours to be useful in their future work.