How to Structure Your Offshore Development Center to Achieve Maximum Benefits?

In this post, we shall discuss how to structure your offshore development center to achieve maximum results. We will learn a bit about offshore development service, why you need ODC for your business (if you haven’t already), how to manage people, how to manage processes, and how to manage delivery efficiently to make the most of your offshore development center. 

Introduction 

An offshore software development center is a dedicated office that helps your organization get reliable and trustworthy access to the solutions for the software development requirements. The best part is that you can set up your offshore development center in any part of the world, which allows you to attain premium talent at the best prices possible. You can even refer to it as your economical extension in different parts of the world. 

Why Do You Need ODC for Your Business?

Every organization has a different work culture. However, in software development, almost every organization struggles to figure out the best talent suiting their business needs. 

There are primarily three reasons why your business needs on ODC, which are:

1. When you are looking for a developer with the specific skillset 
2. When the budget is limited for software development
3. When you want global exposure to scaling up your business

Simply put, it will be one of the reasons mentioned here why your business needs an ODC now. Let’s see how to manage people in your ODC once you have set up. 

Structure Your Offshore Development Center

How to Manage People? 

Managing people in business is not challenging; otherwise - design the processes well, and you will not face workplace chaos. However, it could be a little different for the remote team or, in this case, the offshore development team. So, how to manage people operating at your offshore development center effectively? 

Here are a few steps to make the ‘managing people’ at ODC simpler:

1. Clear Expectations, Objectives, Vision

Nothing can be as helpful as clearly stating your remote team members’ objectives, vision, and expectations. To manage them correctly, it is essential to make them understand what they are expected to do. Also, make sure to question them if they understand your point. 

2. Find Self-Motivators, Self-Managers

Your offshore development team must have the willingness to motivate themselves and manage without much assistance. Give them the space needed and let them manage themselves rather than constantly keeping a check on them. Of course, quality checks have to be done but look for a team that pretty much manages everything themselves. 

3. Cultural Differences Must Be Embraced, Not Judged

You will deal with people from another land, so be ready to embrace their culture, language, and work style. The cultural difference, if appropriately amalgamated, can bring tremendous outcomes for your project. They know what you don’t and vice versa. Hence, design a compelling mix of both cultures for unique outcomes that matters to the end-users.  

4. Future Adopters (The Automation)

We know that processes will get automated in the future, the trailer of which we have already started to witness in our businesses. So if you want to manage your offshore software development team effectively, make sure automate management tools are a part of your system. Such tools are huge time saviors and keep your people from wasting time in redundant and unproductive activities. 

5. Communication is Still the Key 

Isn’t clear and concise communication still the best way to manage people. But, irrespective of the language or culture, communicating well and clearly with the other person is still what leads to seamless management. And, perhaps, following what has been a universal rule for years, it will stay in trend always. The best management starts with good communication, precisely. 

How to Manage Processes? 

Then comes a question, ‘how to manage people.’ If you are managing people well, you have solved your problem halfway. The rest path to successful process management can be walked through seamlessly in the following ways. 

1. Brainstorming and Planning 

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin 

Usually the beginning of every process, it is quite important to invest enough time planning and brainstorming about what you want to achieve, how you will divide work between teams, everything about the project, and so on. That usually involves:

1. Alignment - Does business goals align with the project?
2. Resource availability - How many people are needed to complete the project?
3. Scheduling - How to manage enough time for the project? 
4. Cost Estimation - What cost is going to be incurred by the project? 

2. The Requirements 

Understand the technical requirements, every piece of software needed, designing & development needs, customer problem, and objective of the development now. Check whether these questions are solved or not: 

1. What problems does this project solve? 
2. Who will use it, and with what purpose?
3. Is there any need to integrate other tools? 
4. How will privacy be maintained?

3. Prototyping and Design 

After the requirements are in place, it is time for your team to start designing to see how everything functions - just the flow and the functionality. 

Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works. - STEVE JOBS

Decide which software development process your offshore development team will follow. Your team can start with making full-fledged prototypes and test the outcome with the users. Then, it is time to take the feedback and utilize it to modify your operations and outcomes to prepare for delivering what’s needed.

4. Software Development 

Your in-house team and ODC team are all set to propose the design and functionality of the software. Now, it is time to start the development process. One of the most critical steps of the entire process, you and your teams must focus entirely on building the best. Use the agile sprints, build an MVP, or follow the traditional waterfall method - the ultimate goal of building clean must be fulfilled. 

5. Test it Out

While the development is still in progress, paying attention to testing, tracking, and bug fixing is recommended. In-depth testing is essential to keep the product closer to what was planned. Release a product to a small group to track its performance. 

Nobody wants to ship buggy software to end-users, so keep your focus clear on doing everything that makes your product more scalable and bug-free. Bugs have the capacity to kill your reputation, lose revenue, consume hours to develop, which otherwise have been utilized in other productive operations. 

6. Deployment 

The final task to manage is the deployment, where you will launch your software to all the users. You must be ready with your teams to finally launch what you have developed. Also, after-development support and maintenance help needs to be planned here. 

The best way to manage all processes is to discuss all technologies, tools, and strategies involved in advance to ensure that everything runs smoothly when needed. Besides, different processes take different amounts of time, which means you will have to keep enough time for each process to complete successfully. 

Besides, don’t lose communication and manage your teams well. That’s the key to get all processes done successfully, with minimum hassle. 

How to Manage Delivery? 

Now, we have learned how to manage people and processes, and it is time to finally deliver what’s built to the end-users. The delivery process is a special process incorporating all steps to describe a complete approach to prepare and deploy a particular project. Your team needs to have everything designed, tested, and ready with the finalized product to deploy on the delivery date. 

Before the delivery, conduct a meeting with teams involved in the development process and see how everything works. Is it as per your expectations, matches the business requirements, and delivers for which it was prepared. If yes, then you are all set to release your final product. 

Wrap Up 

An offshore development center is such a boon to the development companies. They have got access to a pool of talented developers nationwide. Besides, isn’t it a great way to scale up your business while saving up many costs? Of course, it is! Also, it is critical to structure your offshore development center to make the most of your ODC team. So, go ahead and structure your ODC to get the maximum benefit now.