Hiring offshore software engineers has a number of advantages, including cost savings, access to a vast pool of talent, flexibility, scalability, and the ability to replace gaps in your development team.
An offshore development team may boost your personnel in a variety of ways and accelerate your success, whether you’re developing mobile applications, building websites, upgrading your UI/UX, or driving efficiency in your quality assurance and testing process.
There are things you can do to strengthen the partnership and maintain a seamless workflow when recruiting offshore software professionals as part of your team.
Let’s look at how these best practices can help you hire offshore developers to construct a strong product development team:
1. Preparing Your Organization
Every company has its own unique work culture. When adding an outsourced resource, such as an offshore software development team, make sure your in-house team members understand why the choice was made and how it will influence them. Transparency is required in this situation. It’s reasonable for some people to be concerned about their employment and professions.
You must set the tone by identifying and communicating the reasons behind your decision and how it will affect the team. If you’re recruiting an offshore software team for the first time, you should have executive-level backing for the decision and communication with your team.
As your project progresses, look for folks in your organization who are willing to work with you to make it a success.
They can become your change champions and help soften any concerns for other in-house team members.
2. Setting the Partnership Up for Success
For both your in-house team and your offshore development team, you want to start the relationship off right. Here are a few ways that can accelerate the process.
2.1 Create Time for Knowledge Sharing
Make sure your team has enough time to transfer knowledge successfully and build strong vendor relationships with your software engineers. Remember, they may be in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Asia, and in a different time zone.
2.2 Get Documentation Updated
Before you start to work with remote developers, make sure your documentation and processes are as up-to-date as possible. When you hire offshore software developers, they can reverse engineer products, but the more documentation you can provide, the less time it will take in the application development process.
2.3 Establish Communications and Processes
When you are doing any kind of project management with a remote team, you must establish your communication and collaboration protocols. Whether you choose to use Slack, Trello, Asana, Basecamp, or another platform, you need to ensure everyone on the web development or custom software development team understands the overall project workflow.
You will also want a robust onboarding process to train the team on products, tech stacks, and processes.
2.4 Define the Scope of Work
When you hire offshore developers or a software development company, you need to clearly define the scope of work to avoid miscommunication or change orders in the future — especially if you hire developers at an hourly rate. While there may be unexpected things that evolve your thinking, the more detailed the scope of work, the more cost-efficient you will be.
3. Define the New Model for Product Development
You also need to define responsibilities across both your offshore development team and your in-house team members.
As part of your digital transformation to offshore software development services, you need to make sure everyone knows their role, deliverables, timelines, and accountability.
Besides setting up your structure for communication, you also need to ensure your in-house team members know your expectations and the parameters. For example, remote work may be conducted outside of normal business hours. This may require occasional communication outside of the typical workday.
There may be other changes to how communication happens, such as:
- More frequent recording of decisions and conversations (i.e. more formal communication)
- Higher visibility into online availability and tracking
- More rigorous attention to process and documentation
- Shift from in-person or stand-up meetings to virtual or remote formats
4. Ensuring Long-Term Success
The cost of hiring team members can be high, which is one of the reasons many organizations turn to offshore software developers in the first place — especially when there’s a defined project or the team lacks expertise and knowledge in specific areas. Offshore teams help you grow your talent pool without long-term payroll costs.
There’s also a cost if you have to switch vendors or find different offshore partners. The best solution is to adopt a mindset of creating a long-term partnership to avoid these headaches. Establish a healthy relationship from the very beginning with buy-in from the executive team.
Any challenges, risks, or concerns from any team member should be addressed promptly with detailed feedback to enable teams to resolve them and improve.
Looking to Hire Offshore Software Developers?
gumi Solutions is a member company of gumi Group. gumi Group consists of gumi Japan headquartered in Tokyo, gumi Vietnam, gumi Solutions and Vand headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City.
gumi Solutions is a trusted offshore partner with access to the top talent in Vietnam. gumi has more than 500 employees, supporting diverse fields of mobile technology, web, AR/VR, AI, etc.
gumi brings you the benefits of a technology-led outsourcing service provider along with Japanese quality. Let us help you maximize your success while minimizing your development costs. To discuss your projects, contact gumi Solutions today, your trusted offshore partner.