Angeli is the Founder and COO at Workast. Her team ensures our users have an exceptional customer experience with Workast and takes care of all user issues.
It can be a good idea to hire offshore software development companies from different countries to help your company be more competitive and make high-quality software at a good price. Yet, there is always a worry about the productivity of the team. One of the main differences between offshoring and outsourcing is productivity management with long distances.
Not only that, but another important question in outsourcing is whether the vendor will be able to meet their promises. As soon as the accounting or payroll is done by another company, the client company might worry about meeting regulations.
In the world of software development, the most important thing is how well the team works together. Because of the epidemic, more and more businesses are willing to look into the idea of outsourced work.
According to Statista, the outsourcing market around the world was worth $92.5 billion at the end of 2019. There are many industries that outsource, but the IT industry is one of the first to do so. Since the 1980s, software development has been done by other people. Fortunly has released statistics on offshoring that show that 64% of offshoring is done for software application development.
Productivity is how many shovels, lines of code, or products are made in a given amount of time. This is how productivity is measured in simple terms. The more people there are, the more productive they will be, as long as they keep the quality the same.
Since the pandemic, the number shows how many benefits there are to outsourcing the development of software apps. Particularly, offshoring, which moves a company's processes, like software development, to another country, has huge advantages.
Since productivity has been linked to time, if you don't measure something, you can't improve it. That's why the customer company needs to keep track of the time that hired people to work.
There are two ways to pay for a job: in a time and materials model, the amount of time worked is either required or evidence that the vendor has worked as many hours as it was supposed to.
In spite of what many people think, giving the vendor their own online timesheet system like Calamari is a good idea. There are many benefits to this, including:
The data is safe because only a few employees can get their hands on the source data and only administrators can change it. Also, there are logs that show exactly when and what was done, so there is less risk of someone making changes without permission.
As long as the data is kept in the client's environment, it speeds up the process of getting the report. Instead of writing the report, the vendor is only taking the data that has already been collected and is legal.
The tool fits in with the client's environment. Finally, the client is the one who needs to make sure the work is done right and deal with most of the paperwork. It can be difficult to hire an offshore partner, but using an easy tool to gather data can help ease many of the pains.
If you want to use Calamari, for example, you can use it on your phone or computer. You can also use it as a kiosk app and in many other ways. This means that no matter where the vendor's employee is, the app will be there for him or her to use.
Workast also has a feature where you can log the time spent on a task. Therefore, when you are working on specific tasks, you can advise how much time a certain task took.
It's kind of the opposite of what you'd do. Tracking the time of employees gives you a clear picture of how much work they have. Tracking the time of a project is all about the costs and benefits of working together. Remote project management is possible with the right software.
An easy-to-use tool like Calamari makes assigning to a project simple. This way, the vendor can see how much time each employee spent on the project or a feature. This makes it easier to do your taxes, especially if there is a higher wage for a group of people, like senior coders.
Also, by having precise and clear information about how much work each project is, how long it takes, and how many coders are working on it, the company can check out different vendors or compare how well each team is working together.
With the Workast timeline view and the use of due dates, you can track the time spent on a project based on when the first task started. You can schedule each task out so that the team members work chronologically, and therefore, will be able to estimate the end date of a project.
Other options that we love for remote project management include Asana, Trello, Click-up and Monday.com.
Sometimes, in-house teams get too many projects. An IT company can cut down on its workload by offshoring certain tasks that would otherwise take up their time and attention. As a result, business people can stay up to date and focus on the most important parts of the business, and they don't have to compromise on the quality or the time of projects.
This can cut the time it takes to get a product to market by a lot, and it can be a big advantage for any modern company. People in the business world will also be able to focus on customers and other important things, like marketing, branding, agility, and efficiency.
The pandemic has made it clear that working from home is a good option for many businesses. If this is the case for most software development companies, it can be safely said they have little to no incentive to finish projects on time.
Even though there is a lot of in-house talent, outsourcing strategies have been used by big companies and even start-ups because they access a wider talent pool. Companies can hire people from all over the world. Regardless of where your business is, hiring the right people will keep things running smoothly and boost productivity.
When you have a project that needs to be done on time, it is important to keep in mind that there may be gaps because of cultural differences. There should be clear communication and expectations set up before you hire offshore developers or teams.
The current economic crisis is a great time to build and hire offshore software development services. It's important for businesses to use it to restructure their business and save money, but they also need to make sure they pick the right offshore team that can help them reach their business goals.
This is only one part of the job. The second is being clear about what needs to be done. Without that, the information about productivity is skewed by the time spent figuring out what the goal is.
A goal must be:
Measurable: There needs to be a way to tell if it was delivered or not.
If the goal needs to be done by an agreed-upon deadline or by a certain number of hours, it must be time-logged.
People need to be clear about what they want and what the vendor and the client need to do to get it done. This includes things like what features need to be added, how big the project will be, and how it will work.
A good way to figure out how productive a team is is to know how long it took them to reach their goals and how many people worked on them.
Hire, train, and house employees who work on software in-house and you'll pay more. If a company doesn't have a lot of money to spend on software development, they could outsource it to an offshore team to cut down on the total cost of delivery. If a company wants to outsource some of its work to an offshore development centre, it can hire teams based on the project's needs, engagement models, and costs.
Companies, like Vuram, have people who know how to use new technologies so that they can provide top-notch service for global businesses at a price that fits the company's budget. Because offshore teams use their own hardware and networks, companies don't have to spend money on infrastructure for them to do their work.
It doesn't matter how far apart you are, communication is the heart and soul of cooperation with any group of people, not just with an IT team in another country.
This needs to be worked out as well. What tools will be used, how much time will be set aside for status meetings, and how many of them will be effective need to be worked out.
There are a lot of tools you can use, but Slack or Microsoft Teams are the most popular right now. Also, they are flexible enough to be used with useful apps, like Calamari. In spite of the idea that "everything is written down," emails are often messy and chaotic.
In every company, there are different ways to communicate, and this needs to be taken into account when setting up a way of working together.
Finally, the client company doesn't seem to be in charge of the offshore team, at least not in the same way that junior employees are. Thus, the project owner should be able to trust the vendor when it comes to day-to-day business.
Because micromanagement hurts the vendor team's productivity and frustrates the client company, it can do a lot of damage to both sides of the project. The "leap of faith" at the start of the text is about letting go of micromanagement and going agile with a team that isn't in the same place.
When you hire a software developer from another country, it can be like rocket fuel for both a start-up and a well-known company. The problem is with how well the team works and how they work together.
If both people know what they want to do and when they need to do it, everything will be fine. However, if the client company doesn't have any data, they can't tell if the collaboration is working or not.
In a nutshell, to avoid the mental hassle, these basic steps mentioned above are proved very much meaningful while looking after offshore projects and productivity management.
Workast