Top 10 Success Killers of Your Nearshore Development Team

In our seven years of starting up more than 90 teams we naturally came across many issues that were common bottlenecks to the success of the team. Failing to resolve such or letting them escalate further may lead your project against the current.

When outsourcing your development team we strongly encourage you to avoid the following pitfalls, which we have combined in our Top 10 Success Killers. Ciklum offers a detailed start-up checklist and training to ensure that these problems do not appear on your work table.

Please note that this list is relevant only for the unique triangular knowledge sharing dedicated team model, a business model pioneered by Ciklum.

	1. Lack of communication with the team on start-up phase While starting to work with the new team there is a significant risk that misunderstandings may happen. The lack of communication at the beginning will cost you additional time for rework, missed deadlines, and bad relationship.
	2. Lack of planning efforts and reporting Lack of project tracking and reporting can lead to the unexpected results right before or during the deadline when it is too late to change anything. It is a rather common situation where a team faces problems, because not enough attention was paid to reporting, planning, intermediate review, and coordination.
	3. Ignoring formal requirements Requirements are an inherent part of the software development process, and they cannot be ignored. By all means, requirements are very useful both for the development and for QA processes. The lack of them can lead to an increased amount of rework, low quality, poor performance, and missed deadlines.
	4. Unclearness about the company’s vision and strategy, project scope The team can’t develop a successful product if they don’t understand the final user, the products goals and concepts. If you don’t put an effort to explain these to the team (or at least to the PM), you will always be disappointed that you team doesn’t catch your ideas on the fly.
	5. Unclear ownership of the tasks Tasks addressed to nobody are seldom done. Avoid asking several people to get the job done. The idea of giving people a clear task ownership is very important when the team is working for an overall result.
	6. Care about discipline when it is too late The discipline is easy to lose and hard to get back. If you don’t want to spend your time afterwards in useless explanations why it is not allowed to appear at work at noon, invest some time at the start in writing a short Company Policy: working hours, vacations, sick days, absence, time-keeping, etc.
	7. Improper reaction to the team growth The management approach depends on the team size - the management model that is suitable for small team is not working in the case of larger teams. You simply can’t manage ten people in the same way as you managed two. Always keep in mind that team growth means more efforts in discipline, planning, documentation, rules, tracking, reporting, etc.
	8. Lack of in-person communications Working with your team virtually for a long period of time leads to a mutual distrust, causes tension and creates a colder relationship even without any particular reasons for that. You should accept this psychological phenomenon and pack your bags for a personal visit from time to time. Alternatively you can invite the team to your place, for example, at the beginning for a knowledge transfer or when starting a new project, passing main milestones, etc.
	9. Cultural difference and language Awareness of cultural differences and learning from generalizations about other cultures is a good approach. However, never use those generalizations as a stereotype, and always remember that the “cultural difference” is not a reason for missing deadlines. Using a language which is not native both for you and your team may also be an additional difficulty; not all the team members may possess a good knowledge of English. To avoid misunderstandings, write documentation in a simple manner, which is always good for any technical documentation.
	10. Inappropriate technical set-up The quality of the results depends not only on the professionalism of the team members, but also on the tools the team uses. An inappropriate technical environment, lack of knowledge about the tools applied on client’s side, lack of some hardware facilities - will significantly slow down the performance of the team.