I am honored to take this GREAT chance to share my experience working with remote development teams over past few years.
1. Business – driven project management
It is quite important to have insight into client’s business and drive development on behalf of client. This includes generating tasks/requirements, providing instant feedback to developer, and making necessary decisions on behalf of client. This maximizes project implementation efficiency and minimizes communication cost.
2. Communicate and write tasks/feedbacks in proper ways
Miscommunication is a huge challenge for a project manager to manage team remotely. Make sure you do not only communicate the tasks/feedbacks that they are expected to perform and what success looks like, but also write them down properly (as much detailed as you can) to the project management tools. This will double ensure that things do not get lost during translation, especially when working with a remote team.
3. Daily release & Feedback
Daily scrum meeting ensures that your remote team is in contact every day, so that any issues, problems or concerns could be clarified and fixed in time. It would be great to have daily releases for review and provide daily feedback. This ensures development is going towards the right direction and you therefore have a good handle of it.
4. Daily reports & Productivity monitoring
Make sure your remote team provides reasonably detailed daily reports and they make sense to you. Do NOT hesitate to ask your team any questions you may have in terms of their daily work done and understanding of next steps. This will help you track development progress and identify problems in timely manner.
5. Be available to your team via email, IM or mobile phone at any time
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of being “present” for your remote team. You should be available via IM, email or mobile phone any time even when you are not in office. This is VERY important for projects that require quick check-in or discussion, where decisions could be made quickly and issues could be addressed correctly.
6. Quality control & Attention to details
Quality is the key of delivery. Make sure you are confident with your weekly or ad-hoc release before you submit it to client, as client may lose patience and question your capability of delivery if they have to spend significant amount of time pointing out bugs. It’s rather better to delay a weekly or ad-hoc release than submitting an uncomfortable build just because it’s planned. Attention to details is the key to secure a success and long term relationship, as it demonstrates your value, reputation, and most importantly the difference between you and your competitions.
7. Problem solving and innovations
Problems can cause work to slow down or come to a complete halt, especially if it involves decisions that need your client’s approval. Prior to you or your team going ahead to ask client what to do, make sure you think it thoroughly and provide your suggestions and solutions based on your experience. It’s quite important to lead the client what to do, rather than simply throwing questions to client.
8. Give your developers power to make decision
If you are managing a team with a number of developers or managing a few projects concurrently, you will need to see who you can trust and give your team member authority to make certain decisions. This will of course be dependent on the kind of structure you have built. It will ease your life and save you a ton of time.
9. Project management tool
Lastly I’d like to mention that there are many decent project management tools you can use to track project process remotely. E.g: Basecamp, Trello, JIRA, Redmine, etc… Find a tool that you feel most comfortable and you are ready to rock!