1. Frequent communication

Communication really is the key to a healthy relationship. Quick mails, phone calls, video conferences, planned weekly status meetings, and personal visits facilitate understanding and make the cooperation fruitful.

2. Accurate planning, tracking and reporting

Even a very well documented project with a super PM may go wrong without a proper monitoring process. Changes and unforeseeable consequences always happen. Being always well informed and making in-time changes into the requirements and plans are your success factor in this issue.

3. Clear project documentation

Clear requirements documentation, accurate project plans with short milestones and clear deliverables are always the key factors of timely projects. If you don’t write documentation, you have to travel a lot. It is just a tradeoff – nothing more!    

4. Delivering your mission to the team, clear goals and results

The better your team knows and understands your business, your products and visions, the easier your cooperation with the team. Every team member should clearly understand the common goals needed to be achieved by the whole team. The team should be driven to meet the expectations and continuously adopt the process to deliver results.

5. Good initial knowledge transfer

Initial knowledge transfer is very important for the newly recruited people. Starting to work for a new company always means a lot of efforts to grasp in a short period of time the huge amount of work already done by the home office. The more information delivered to the team at the beginning, the more effective the future cooperation will be.

6. Assigning a person to oversee the nearshore development team

Having a supervisor (sometimes called a “nearshore officer”), a dedicated person from the client’s team is a good support for the newly started team. Of course, it means some additional efforts from this person, but the results are worth it.

7. Treatment as a part of own company

We tell our customers that their teams working at Ciklum are a virtual part of their respective companies, which is a complete truth. Keep in mind that faithful workers are typically those who feel themselves as valuable colleagues and who are given interesting and challenging tasks.

8. Regular visits

It is not a secret that in-person communication is much more effective than remote relationships. During a one day personal visit you can discuss the same number of issues as you usually do during the week via e-mail and messenger.

9. Satisfaction surveys

It is always good to know the mood inside the team, its attitude towards the project after a lapse of time, employees’ expectations and plans. In addition to the semi-annual reports, prepared to you by our Retention department based on the interviews with every team member, you will always benefit from the private talks with your employees.

10. Good technical set-up

Without a proper technical infrastructure it is impossible to deliver good results. When starting a nearshore team using Ciklum’s model, one always need to think how to combine in-house and nearshore environments.

1. Lack of communication with the team on start-up phase

While starting to work with the new team there is a significant risk that misunderstandings may happen. The lack of communication at the beginning will cost you additional time for rework, missed deadlines, and bad relationship.

2. Lack of planning efforts and reporting

Lack of project tracking and reporting can lead to the unexpected results right before or during the deadline when it is too late to change anything. It is a rather common situation where a team faces problems, because not enough attention was paid to reporting, planning, intermediate review, and coordination.

3. Ignoring formal requirements

Requirements are an inherent part of the software development process, and they cannot be ignored. By all means, requirements are very useful both for the development and for QA processes. The lack of them can lead to an increased amount of rework, low quality, poor performance, and missed deadlines.

4. Unclearness about the company’s vision and strategy, project scope

The team can’t develop a successful product if they don’t understand the final user, the products goals and concepts. If you don’t put an effort to explain these to the team (or at least to the PM), you will always be disappointed that you team doesn’t catch your ideas on the fly.

5. Unclear ownership of the tasks

Tasks addressed to nobody are seldom done. Avoid asking several people to get the job done. The idea of giving people a clear task ownership is very important when the team is working for an overall result.

6. Care about discipline when it is too late

The discipline is easy to lose and hard to get back. If you don’t want to spend your time afterwards in useless explanations why it is not allowed to appear at work at noon, invest some time at the start in writing a short Company Policy: working hours, vacations, sick days, absence, time-keeping, etc.

7. Improper reaction to the team growth

The management approach depends on the team size - the management model that is suitable for small team is not working in the case of larger teams. You simply can’t manage ten people in the same way as you managed two. Always keep in mind that team growth means more efforts in discipline, planning, documentation, rules, tracking, reporting, etc.

8. Lack of in-person communications

Working with your team virtually for a long period of time leads to a mutual distrust, causes tension and creates a colder relationship even without any particular reasons for that. You should accept this psychological phenomenon and pack your bags for a personal visit from time to time. Alternatively you can invite the team to your place, for example, at the beginning for a knowledge transfer or when starting a new project, passing main milestones, etc.

9. Cultural  difference and language

Awareness of cultural differences and learning from generalizations about other cultures is a good approach. However, never use those generalizations as a stereotype, and always remember that the “cultural difference” is not a reason for missing deadlines. Using a language which is not native both for you and your team may also be an additional difficulty; not all the team members may possess a good knowledge of English. To avoid misunderstandings, write documentation in a simple manner, which is always good for any technical documentation. 

10. Inappropriate technical set-up

The quality of the results depends not only on the professionalism of the team members, but also on the tools the team uses. An inappropriate technical environment, lack of knowledge about the tools applied on client’s side, lack of some hardware facilities - will significantly slow down the performance of the team.