Remote work and office work have both pros and cons, but if you need to manage remote teams, we have put together 10 tools for managing offshore teams that will improve your productivity and the performance of your software development team several times over and help reduce misunderstandings between the two parties.
First, let’s understand what difficulties are most often faced by the management of offshore teams.
● Lack of face-to-face communication
Indeed, such communication would help you better understand each other. Often colleagues even become friends. But given the distance, such a development is unlikely. To compensate for the lack of live communication, the parties communicate in video calls, which helps to understand better.
● Inability to control the process from A to Z
You are the manager and you are here, and your offshore team is somewhere there. How to control the process of performing tasks? In addition, you may have different time zones; setting tasks in advance and checking them can become even more difficult.
● Performance control
How can you know that a remote team does not cheat and honestly performs its tasks without exaggerating the time to perform them? This question is not easy if you are not a professional and do not know exactly how much and what time it takes.
10 Tools for Managing Offshore Teams
1. Slack
Of course, we couldn’t help but mention Slack, because it is still the number one way of communication in the world among IT professionals. Here you can easily create tasks, deadlines, individual chats for departments, make appointments, distribute documents, and update the status of your workload. Accordingly, as an offshore management team, you can control the workload of your employees and their tasks as well as actively collaborate with them.
2. Google Meet
This tool was created specifically to increase face-to-face communication. Its convenience is that you can easily add members of your company and divide them into departments. This is very important when you need to urgently address issues with the design or the development itself. Of course, you can use the usual Skype or even Slack, which supports the video chat function, but Google Meet allows you to connect many participants at once and does not throw participants in the call.
3. Trello
This tool is created mostly for the managers themselves because it is easy to create tasks, set deadlines, add descriptions, project labels, or individual dashboards for each project or activity depending on the team, you can also extend your tasks to other team members, add comments under tasks, add documents or images – it’s very convenient to have everything you need in one place.
According to a Washington Post report, the speed of the Internet can seriously affect the speed of the devices themselves. The problem is that the speed of the Internet can drop imperceptibly, so you should periodically check the speed of your Internet several times a month so that the situation does not become critical. Xfinity Speed Test Tool can help you to check your Internet speed and your efficiency in a few clicks.
5. Google Drive
This is the most popular and so far the best tool for storing files in the cloud, which can be shared with many people who can even edit them in real time. Why invent something if it is already invented? A little advice from us: save different files in different folders. Otherwise, you can get lost in these files and never find the right one.
6. Timely
Thanks to this tool, you can track the working hours of your employees. In fact, it is good not only for the managers themselves to see the overall picture of their employees’ day and their productivity but also for employees whose efficiency increases markedly with the introduction of time tracking. For you as an offshore team manager, this will also help you keep track of your funds—you will only pay for the work actually done.
7. Status Hero
This tool will allow your remote offshore team to avoid unnecessary work and confusion because it often happens that two people do the same job. Hero Status allows each employee of the offshore team to see who is working on what now. In addition, it is a great motivator because you see that everyone has a job, and you also want to do yours.
8. Mondaу
Monday is a difficult day, but not with this tool. Monday is an attractive and intuitive interface that allows you to create and complete tasks faster. Why faster? Because artificial intelligence does everything for you and optimizes!
9. InVision
If you want to become a guru of concepts, presentations and design, then you should definitely pay attention to this tool—here you can turn concepts into reality.
10. IDoneThis
This tool simplifies the process of notifying you of updates at the end of the working day, Instead of writing long letters, just make updates in a few clicks. And you, as an offshore team manager, can easily track tasks.
There is never a limit to improvement, and the tools described above will help you better manage a remote team and increase its efficiency. In our age of technology, it is important to use all the opportunities available to us, so try the described tools for managing offshore teams and choose the best for you.
Premium Offshore Software Development
At Israel IT, we use many different tools to establish the right management between our offshore teams and you as a client, including Google Drive, Trello, Slack and Google Meet. It is easy to start cooperation with Israel IT, because we will provide you with all the ready-made tools for managing offshore teams and you will be able to see for yourself how effective they are. Also, we are always open to new offers. If you want to implement new tools for the management of the offshore team from Israel IT, we will gladly agree. We guarantee the provision of all channels of communication between you and the offshore team, support of recruiters, full reporting of processes and their coordination with you. Learn more about Israel IT and choose your remote team today!
