Working with teams remotely definitely has its place and its advantages. For some projects and tasks, outsourcing work to a third party can enable you access skills, knowledge, and infrastructure that you would otherwise not be able to afford. In other cases, enabling some members of your dev team to work remotely can reduce your costs, improve flexibility, and help you to attract key talent from within your field.
Web development is a kind of remote working task. This is the kind of role that can be done with nothing more than a laptop and an internet connection. However, while using a remote working development team has definite advantages, it also presents some unique logistical challenges.
Successfully managing any remote working team requires an awareness of these difficulties and the solutions.
Schedule Regular Communications:
Perhaps the biggest challenge when managing a remote working team lies in ensuring that you are communicating with them clearly at all times. It is much easier to communicate with people and to properly hear their response when you are talking face to face. When that isn’t possible, you should be seeking to hold regular conferencing sessions with your dev team.
Regular communications systems make it easy for you to stay on top of what your dev team is doing and to provide them with the latest feedback and instructions from your end.
Equip Yourself with the Right Tools:
Completing any job to the best of your abilities requires the right tools, and digital jobs are no different in this respect. Overseeing any project requires a certain set of skills on the part of project managers – this includes the ability to stay on top of and keep track of objectives, as well as setting and enforcing deadlines for your key milestones.
All of these tasks become significantly easier if you have the right project management tools in place for your business. Project management software combines all the individual tools you need to manage a project in one convenient package, so it is well worth investing the time and money you need to find the right one. Check here for a breakdown of the best project management tools for 2020.
Clearly Lay Out Your Roadmap:
Roadmap is one of those terms that has become something of a buzzword, and yet it refers to something tangible and useful. A roadmap is a component of your overall business plan. As the name implies, it is a map of sorts for taking you from your current market position to achieving your key goals and objectives.
Having a clearly defined roadmap to share with your team that lays out exactly where they are going and how to get there will make it much easier for your dev team to plan out their workflow.
Overseeing remote workers requires a different approach to managing staff within your office. However, as long as you are aware of the specific challenges of managing a remote team and how to overcome them, you should find it perfectly achievable. The key lies in constant and clear communications between you and your team.