Choosing an outsourcing solution When choosing an outsourcing solution, there are different options for geographical distribution of teams. The challenge of outsourcing is…
Choosing an outsourcing solution
When choosing an outsourced solution, there are different options for geographical distribution of teams. The challenge with outsourcing is to provide the customer with a solution that is not only cost-effective, but also faster and of higher quality than a local market or in-house hiring process can offer, with less risk and other benefits that come from finding the right partner. right strategic. .
Where these teams and team members physically are on any given day is largely invisible to the customer and decision makers. The evolution of communication platforms in all formats – text, audio, video – has led to a world in which physical location is largely ubiquitous for most of the tasks we perform . However, some software development activities benefit significantly from physical proximity for immediate communication, building a team culture, and collaborative and trusting exercises such as whiteboard sessions.
In remote work versus co-located work , Martin Fowler states the benefits of distributed teams but does not endorse virtual or remote teams. But he also recognizes that he is influenced by his own experience. Your generation wasn't born into a world of cloud technology and containers, Slack, GitHub, and a myriad of other technologies. tools and platforms that can be accessed from anywhere . Furthermore, your argument is based on your (well-informed) opinion more than any data or metrics. I would argue that the very ubiquity of localization makes it very difficult to study or track. VPNs allow us to securely access network resources while hiding our location with a new IP address.
Having spent nearly a decade working remotely, I'm a proponent of its benefits . Control over your time and work environment means you can set it up to be more productive without wasting time commuting. Costs are significantly reduced for both the company and the worker. Unless your business is real estate, maintaining a physical office doesn't directly add value to your core business. But that doesn't mean you don't need custom real estate software development.
Critics would argue that a remote workforce increases risk – how can you trust your employees to be productive if you can't actually see them? How do you know they are working? Are they able to organize themselves? Are they working in safe locations?
My answer to these questions is very simple. Top performers will mitigate these risks for you .
A high performer will want to maximize their productivity and time spent doing things they enjoy. By allowing you autonomy to organize yourself, you are maximizing production. Having worked in virtual teams, I can assure you that this is a huge incentive . Therefore, if there are specific safety or productivity concerns, there is more incentive to address them.
But regardless of where someone feels physically, if someone isn't performing well, I don't believe an office environment will significantly improve their performance. Yes, you can look over your shoulder and catch up on coffee breaks, but then you need to question whether you want team members like that in the first place.
Highly skilled remote workers also tend to overcommunicate – they know how crucial this is and seek to optimize communication to overcome physical distance. Critics often say that there is nothing as effective as face-to-face communication between team members, and I'd say you're right! But what they don't recognize is that different activities can have distinctly effective forms of communication, just as different people have different communication styles.
For example, the start of a project. Team members come together for the first time, participate in planning and design activities, transfer knowledge, and establish a project's culture and rules of engagement. In my experience, it's best to do this in person over a period of one or two weeks. There is no virtual substitute as effective.
But we don't start projects or hold daily whiteboard sessions. Once epics and stories are written and assigned to sprints, the bulk of the activity a team engages in is implementation. A non-disruptive environment is vital to maintaining the deep focus needed to perform most of these tasks.
A hybrid approach that brings together remote workers for some activities and then work virtually for others allows us to optimize physical location . Cost savings in maintaining large office spaces and infrastructure pay for short-term travel expenses. With the rise of coworking spaces and low-cost airlines the business case for this teamwork model practically writes itself.
Humans live based on routines and it will take years to break the mental habit that makes us associate going to a physical office with productivity. When choosing team composition and location, I recommend that you separate your concerns as much as possible to best optimize your resources. Broadly speaking, these concerns are:
- Productivity
- Security
- Communication
Productivity
We have never had so many tools available to measure productivity . When establishing the ground rules for your project, make the processes as clear as possible, set expectations based on well-defined metrics . This should be done with any project, but especially with virtual teams. You might be surprised to learn that these team members quickly exceed your expectations and start demanding more work! This is also common in my experience and encourages everyone to improve, especially in maintaining a well-organized task backlog for these teams.
Security
Creating policies and procedures for remote access is a valuable information security exercise. If your organization doesn't have them solidly implemented and regularly audited, revisiting them to support remote work is an opportunity. Provide virtual teams with exact hardware, software, and network access requirements before onboarding. If teams need to access sensitive data, establish appropriate controls so that data cannot be copied or downloaded. For most software development and testing tasks, I've found that obfuscating and creating sample data sets often eliminates any real need to access sensitive data.
On the other hand, I'm often surprised by how little attention is paid to these same policies and controls when you're inside a physical office. As a remote worker, I protect my home office because it is also part of my home, physically and virtually. You'll find that skilled remote workers are more concerned about security for the same reason and have a deep interest in complying with your organization's standards and policies.
Communication
Effective communication, as well as productivity metrics, must be established, agreed upon and documented at the beginning of any project. Team communication breakdown and misalignment can occur when people sit close to each other in a shared space. Just like security, working with virtual teams forces us to add discipline to our projects. If there are no network issues, virtual teams communicate as quickly as co-located teams , and it's often easier to give someone Slack than to get up from your desk and walk across a room. But established rules and expectations must be respected . For example, responses to specific email topics or Slack channel messages should be timed based on urgency and priority that teams will respect.
Also, don't forget that different activities may require different types of communication, and bringing together remote teams for specific rituals or milestones is always an option and a cost balanced by the value you get from creating virtual teams.
