How to Effectively Manage and Communicate with a Remote Development Team – A Guide for CTOs

Remote working, especially in the IT sector, has become a popular concept since the Covid-19 outbreak. As this trend is here to stay, managing a remote development team is the need of the hour. Whatever your business setup may be, an efficient team of developers will help you stay ahead of the competition. A Chief Technology Officer (CTO) prepares the roadmap for business development and success. Obviously, his responsibilities include effective management and communication with a remote development team to efficiently organize and control all the processes for seamless project completion. Below are some steps to help define and optimize the management and collaboration with a remote development team.

Steps for Remote Development Team Management

A CTO should follow a remote development team checklist to manage performance and boost productivity during work hours.

• Additionally, use a remote work policy to ensure that the remote work model is streamlined.
• Maintain a good team structure composition
• Set clear work guidelines
• Organize scheduling to attain maximum productivity
• Track performance consistently
• Create a comfortable environment for remote communication
• Clear doubt with powerful open-ended questions and result-driven learnings
• Efficient communication plans must be in place
• Strive for a ‘no communication gap’ target
• Empower the team with remote work communication tools
• Offering constructive feedback

All these are important steps to ensure that the project is heading in the right direction. These are described in detail below to help you acquire comprehensive know-how.

Good Team Structure

Managing a remote development team is quite a complex process due to the fact that it requires a lot of responsibility and an organized approach. A CTO needs to build the remote development team in accordance with project requirements. As a remote development team needs to collaborate with many stakeholders, criteria like good teamwork, passion for excellence, patience, and good listening ability are very important. So, choose the experts after a strategic evaluation of their competencies and assign roles according to the team hierarchy.

Work Guidelines Management

Due to the remote geographical locations, time limits, and other challenges, precise work guidelines should be prepared by the CTOs to enhance collaboration with the remote development team. Documenting all the project ground rules will not only present project ideas with clarity but also convey the CTO’s expectations from the team. Besides, prompt response to emails, the inclusion of all functionality, and conveying the information quickly to all team members ensure maximum productivity, good accountability, and great teamwork.

Organizing Schedules

While managing a remote development team, organizing schedules is quite a challenging task. Apart from work pressure and complexity, the CTOs need to keep in mind the issue of different time zones. To attain maximum productivity, set flexible but specific working hours and, at the same time, maintain an overlapping schedule. Always reserve a few hours every day for meetings, Q&A sessions, and scrums.

Tracking Performance Consistently

CTOs ensure maximum productivity along with project success by consistently tracking the performance of the team. It is also good to assess the progress of individual team members. By using user-friendly management tools, CTOs can easily track the performance of the team. This easy and transparent process helps to evaluate the contribution of each team member to the project and the value they individually bring to the team. Hence, tracking performance makes sure everyone stays productive and the project deadline is met without a hitch.

Enhance Communication

The success of a good remote development team depends on clear and timely communication. Working remotely means your team members are spread across different time zones. Therefore, setting meeting times and ensuring an organized workflow require effective communication in addition to maintaining a strict schedule. Always ensure your team stays on the same page about everything. Prioritize regular, relevant, and short stand-up meetings. Face-to-face meetings add a personal touch to this technical world. Your facial impression conveys more meaningful value to your messages than your tone.

Make Clear Communication Plans

Working remotely, specifically for a software development team, requires transparency and efficient communication to achieve success in their project work. As such, CTOs first need to select a unified digital workplace platform for implementing the remote communication strategy.

Emphasize Strong Open-ended Questions

A remote development team can encounter problems while working on a project. As it is a virtual workspace, many-a-times reaching a solution may require waiting for the next scheduled meeting. To tackle such untimely obstacles, prepare a comprehensive list of open-ended questions like why, when, how, or what pertaining to the project. CTOs need to involve the team members while answering the above questions to ensure that every team member is fully looped into the know-how mechanism of the project. This helps create a positive working environment with more engagement from team members.

Eliminate Communication Gaps

CTOs should always ensure the elimination of any communication gaps among the team members. Spreading across geographic locations and language barriers, any miscommunication can create a roadblock to project success. Hence, use a convenient communication tool and always stay connected. It will help fix various issues and answer many queries with better access to resources.

Use Remote Work Communication Tools

In today’s virtual workspace, the effectiveness of a great communication channel has exponentially increased. As such, CTOs should think about selecting the right tool for internal communication to avoid the possibility of missing critical and time-sensitive information due to its spread across different platforms. The team members can be perplexed if they start to get communication from too many directions and it can cause unnecessarily hinderance to the project’s timely progress.

Offering Feedback and Encouraging Team Spirit

Providing timely feedback helps to fix small bugs or errors quickly. For project completion, this quick and extensive feedback about every iteration and sprint can make all the difference. By rewarding employees in the form of cash bonuses, corporate gifts, or mere praise and encouragement for a well-done job, CTOs can cultivate a positive team spirit and reliability among the team members.