We at EngineerBabu, are committed to helping enterprises of every scale hire remote engineering teams and manage them seamlessly and at an affordable cost. Over the years, we have gathered some really useful tips under our sleeves that can make hiring remote engineering teams and managing them easy. In this article, we will share some of the most important tips on the subject, read on.

Why Hire a Remote Engineering Team?

While remote working has become the new normal, the cost of hiring, managing, and maintaining an in-house remote team has gone up. According to a Forbes article, the cloud costs for enterprises rose by 30% in 2020 compared to last year. Apart from the cost factor, there is a major time factor involved. Hiring a full-time engineer can take anything in between 3-6 months. Extrapolate this to hiring an entire engineering team, the effort and time will be immense. Additionally, the cost of maintaining and training the team – to keep up with the evolving technologies, can make the entire process time and cost-intensive. At EngineerBabu, our mission is to help enterprises hire remote engineering teams at affordable costs across domains and technologies. 

Over the years we have worked with 5000+ founders, 484+ clients, and delivered almost 1000 projects. Working with remote engineering teams can be different from having a full-time in-house team. Especially for enterprises that haven’t done this before. In the subsequent section of this article, we will share the best practices of hiring and managing remote engineering teams.

Best Practices to Hire Remote Engineering Teams

1. Plan Ahead

The world of software engineering is going Agile and iterative. But the same principles may not help while hiring a remote engineering team. If you are building a team from scratch for product development, you must plan ahead. Making a note of the below pointers, before you embark on the journey of hiring a remote engineering team can be helpful.

• Plan the major milestones you would want to achieve and create a roadmap.
• Plan for the technical skills that you would need in the team to achieve your product goal. Not just in the current scenario, but in the future too.
• The number of team members you would need – and the seniority.
• Plan for the skills gap – in case you are augmenting your current team – see the skills gaps that you have in the existing team and then plan to hire a remote engineering team accordingly.

2. Choose the Right Outsourcing Partner

Hiring remote engineering teams is becoming the new normal and so is the proliferation of outsourcing partners. Here are some things to consider while choosing an outsourcing partner:

a. Long-term Partnership

Once you hire a remote engineering team, they will work with you for months and maybe years altogether. It will be important to choose a service provider who can provide long-term product support, helps you plan, and is ready for contingencies. Precisely why, it will be important to look for a partner and not just a provider. Your service provider’s job doesn’t end at building a remote engineering team for your enterprise but seeing the project through.

b. Expertise

While hiring a remote engineering team, it will be important to partner with a service provider that isn’t a one-stop shop for all kinds of remote workers, rather has expertise in helping enterprises hire remote engineering teams across domains and technologies.

c. Compatibility

It will be critical to answer this question – does your outsourcing partner understand your goals and objectives and is passionate about delivering them? It is important that your outsourcing partner is aligned with your enterprise’s objectives, for them to help you hire an engineering remote team. At EngineerBabu, our skilled engineers believe in aligning with your company’s goals to provide expertise for a perfect synergy.

d. Accountability

Other important factors to assess will be – How do they vet the teams, what is their selection process, how do they plan to keep up should you want to augment the team with evolving technology skills, etc.? At EngineerBabu, our engineers are carefully handpicked after a rigorous selection process. Every engineer that we have in our team has two attributes in common. These are, passion for engineering and dedication to deliver on time.

e. Time, Cost, and Effort Required

The choice of the outsourcing partner to hire a remote engineering team will also depend on how soon you want to get started. That will also mean choosing a partner who is fast but does not compromise with quality. For instance, our team has engineers who are Crème de la crème engineers, and our swift process can help you hire a remote engineering team and get started with your project within a week. Another important factor will be to consider the cost of hiring an outsourcing partner. Needless to say, it makes sense partner with an affordable service provider for your enterprise in the long run.

Managing a Remote Engineering Team

Hiring a remote engineering team is just half the battle won, for the success of your project it will be important to manage them efficiently as well. One of the most important aspects to remember while managing a remote engineering team is that a remote engineering team is an extension of your in-house team, whether they are or aren’t on your payroll. Hence, the way you work with a remote engineering team should be similar to how you work with in-house team. It will help build team spirit and strengthen their dedication. Some tips to consider to successfully manage remote engineering are –

1. Communicate

Treating and communicating with your remote engineering team as you would do with a full-time team is important. More often, project managers end up under-communicating with remote teams. It can lead to the team not feeling a part of the bigger goal. Therefore, keeping the remote engineering teams involved in the bigger picture by sharing with them the product roadmap, important milestones that you want to achieve, and most importantly the bigger mission of your product or enterprise will make a great deal of difference. Use a channel like Slack to continuously be in touch.

2. Scrums and Daily Stand-ups

Like any engineering project, scrums and daily stand-ups are important to track the progress of projects, discuss challenges and further steps. Usually, PMs tend to delegate a portion of the project to the remote engineering teams and take weekly updates. It can be counterproductive since any issues or delays will come up only during the weekly updates. Additionally, since the remote engineering team will work hand-in-hand with your full-time team, a daily scrum/stand-up will help them collaborate better.

3. Make the Best Use of Project Management Tools

Use project management tools like JIRA or Hive to plan, manage and track projects. Project management tools can go a long way in planning and to prepare for contingencies as well.

4. Be Agile

Be flexible and Agile enough to tackle any unexpected issues coming your way. The tech world is evolving, so are your product ideas. From idea to implementation, the product will improve as your plan changes. Thus, it will be crucial to consider when you hire a remote engineering team to ensure that team gets communicated with any required modification. Likewise, choosing the right outsourcing partner will become crucial. They will help you adapt to evolving needs by augmenting the team with engineers. Along with the required skill-sets or quickly increasing the team size when needed.

Wrapping Up

Remote work has become the new normal. Many companies plan to shift to a remote working model even post-pandemic. Team augmentation by hiring remote engineers was already being adopted by the IT industry and tech startups. The need and benefits of hiring a remote engineering team have become even more evident in a post-pandemic world. Hiring a remote engineering team can mean – higher productivity with huge time and cost savings. We hope this article will help you in hiring and managing a remote engineering team. However, at EngineerBabu, we partner with enterprises across domains and scale. We help them to build best-in-class engineering teams for crafting a successful product. If you are looking to hire a remote engineering team and want to know more about our services – connect with us.

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