3 Tips for Making Offshore Agile Teams More Effective
Want to make your Offshore Agile Teams more effective? This guide by Vizteck will help you through it all!
Technology
August 1, 2013
Mah Noor
At Vizteck solutions, we have been working with startups to help build them from scratch in offshore mode. We have had a very successful run with them in agile mode from the time when they were just starting up till the time when they have a good client base and investment. All pushing them and giving rise to unexpected opportunities and risks. I would like to share some tips on how we made all of this work.
Communication is critical in agile. It requires daily collaboration between business people, developers, and testers. We recommend daily face-to-face video meetings for at least 10 minutes. This helps in creating relationships between team members, fosters trust, and enables idea sharing by team members. You can also encourage the use of corporate social networks like Yammer to promote idea sharing by team members.
Agile focuses on short-term deliverables. However, you must share the long-term vision of the product with your offshore team. Continuously doing this creates a shared understanding of goals and objectives. Having your vision transferred to the team where they also feel that they are working on a great problem to solve will be a great motivational factor for the team. You think of big things so that the small things can go in the right direction
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Use wire-framing tools like Balsamiq to give visual representation to user stories wherever it’s necessary. If the offshore team does the wireframes, you must treat the wireframes as a final product and give maximum feedback on it because it will ultimately result in lesser feedback after the development. If you doing the wire-frames as a client it would be a good idea to get them reviewed by the developer and the designer.
We have used the above approaches with success on several projects. If you are working with an offshore team, I would like to hear about your experiences. Feel free to tweet me at @barkansaeed
