How to Hire and Manage a Nearshore Software Development Team for a Successful Product Build

As companies worldwide are turning to E-commerce personalization and cloud computing, the business environment around the world is getting more software-driven than ever before. For example, they are turning to IT system transformations, web and software development, SaaS support, etc. Among these changes, IT companies are also considering the nearshore software development team as one of the cost-cutting strategies to handle development and programming requirements to succeed in project development. Being jotted down in this blog includes an explanatory note to nearshore software development and a guide about how to hire and manage it for a successful product build.

An Essential Guide to Nearshore Software Development

The term ‘nearshore software development’ refers to a working condition in which a company distributes its teams to neighboring countries with geographical proximity and similar time zones. For instance, a US-based company outsourcing its IT functions to a company based in Mexico is called a nearshore outsourcing model.

Advantages:

• Geographical proximity to the nearshoring partner
• Availability of a larger talent pool
• Effective resource management of in-house team on key tasks
• Cost savings on project development

What to Consider Before Hiring a Nearshore Development Team

1. Do Not Deviate from Your Project’s Goals and Expectations

What does hiring a team mean if you don’t know what you want it to build for you? Therefore, comprehensively outlining your project’s goals and expectations would lay a solid premise on which you can decide to partner with the best software development company. This may also require the involvement of stakeholders, project managers, and engineers, ensuring everyone associated with the project mutually understands their role and responsibilities.

Also, see if your nearshore outsourcing partner is intelligent enough to understand your expectations regarding the project and can accordingly offer assistance for certain tasks to help you expedite and streamline the project development processes. Therefore, define your project’s scope, goals, and expectations so that you stay informed of what expertise and portfolio you would require to achieve your project’s vision.

2. Choose a Company Embodying a Team-Player Spirit and Lives your Culture

Talent and expertise are undoubtedly the focal points in hiring any third-party development team. Still, it renders no meaningful benefit if the team doesn’t appreciate or try to blend in with your internal culture or lacks a team-player spirit. Therefore, choose a development team that truly understands and is willing to rapidly adopt your internal culture to sound like an extension of a constructive resource integrating with your in-house team.

It later facilitates a well-coordinated working culture between your in-house team and the extended one (nearshore) to transfer the process efficiently. It will also give birth to a team spirit to proactively solve complex technical issues, an outcome with long-lasting impressions beyond the cooperation period.

3. Choose the Team Equipped with Appropriate Resources and Tech Stack

When it comes to searching for the right nearshore software development for your project, don’t fall prey to flowery words and promises you see on the websites of different prospective nearshore partners. You need to see and judge if your perspective software development partner is equipped with the right resources and software tech stack to be able to help you efficiently complete your project. The success of a nearshore partnership depends on the assistance of better resources and tools guided by a common goal and understanding to complete the project successfully and stress-free.

4. Look for Nearshore Developers Based on Track Record

The first impression is not the last in the context of choosing the right nearshore developer for your project. Check if your prospective partner has a proven and excellent track record of services, including the level of experience, expertise, and resourcefulness to handle your project. Honest testimonials and feedback from previous clients about the particular nearshore partner would also help you make an informed decision about its credibility as a service provider. Also, take a look at your prospective vendor’s portfolios, industry-standard accreditations, and awards on its website to get yourself informed of its credence as a software development company.

5. Prioritize the Nearshore Developer with Robust Security Measures

With increasing ransomware attacks, data breaches, and other security vulnerabilities, companies naturally prioritize security consciousness to make their business processes safe from cyber attackers. Therefore, look for a security-consciousness nearshore developer following industry-standard cybersecurity protocols and comprehensive assessment of cybersecurity controls to protect sensitive data related to your project.

Other Crucial Points to Consider When Hiring a Nearshore Software Development Team

• Explain your project’s goals and expectations to the prospective nearshore developer to get an idea of whether their logic and feedback resonate with the vision you have for your project.
• Choose a nearshore company with an easy-to-understand communication flow. It helps communicate ideas effectively. The language barrier is one of the biggest deal-breaking factors in hiring a third-party development team.
• Ask about a QA engineer to avoid technical debt in development during the preliminary stages of your project.
• Look for a nearshore developer that follows an agile methodology for a better workflow resulting in an efficient deployment process.

Learn More: Event Management Software Development

Benefits of Working with the Right Nearshore Software Development Team

1. Availability of a Larger Talent Pool: That’s the most immediate benefit. When you partner with a nearshore developer, you have an extended development team of highly skilled IT professionals, helping you improve work quality and future quality control costs.
2. Geographical Proximity In Similar Time Zone: You can save a great deal on travel times and costs, have seamless in-person meetings and communication, and collaborate with your nearshore developer in the same time zone. It saves you the valuable time you can leverage on handling other core business functions.
3. Same Culture, Mindset, and Language: You experience engaging working with your nearshore developer with a similar mindset and language you understand and communicate with. This facilitates easy integration with your in-house team and expedites project development.
4. Working with a Team Driven by Common Goal and Mutual Understanding: When you hire a nearshore developer, you get the benefit of working with experienced and proficient IT professionals resonating with the goal, scope, and expectation of your project and business. This, in turn, results in easy communication flow, speedy operations, improved productivity, and better team integration.
5. Access to New Technology, Scalable and Flexible Resources: Your nearshore development team not only offers you experienced and expertise-based software building assistance, but it also lets you access its diversified set of skills, technologies, tech stack, and development methodologies it employs to build your project into a standard solution. Moreover, you also get the benefit of helping your business grow and scale smartly.

How to Manage Nearshore Software Development Team

1. Set a Clear Project Goal with the Team

Since your nearshore development team will work remotely and more independently, ensure that the team knows your project’s goals, scope, timeline, and deliverables from the start. Most importantly, the team must be aware of WHY it should work on the project so that they get the sense of your vision associated with the project. To make it more effective, use the SMART approach, as guided below –

2. Ensure that Information is Available Right Away

Seamless and immediate access to crucial project details (e.g., bug fixes and changes in requirements), project files, and data are valuable to expedite project development stress-free. To facilitate this effectively, you need a capable project manager who can ensure that all the tasks regarding the project are accurate and on schedule. Besides, you should prioritize a knowledge base, which is a repository of crucial data, such as deliverables, product deliverables, task lists, and other related files.

3. Schedule Communication with the Team

An effective communication channel like video calls for scheduled team meetings is very essential to get a true sense of employee morale. It allows staff to discuss their issues if any, and ensure that the entire team is connected to the goal of the project. However, avoid over-communication as it is considered one of the most prominent reasons for distraction in workplaces.

4. Give the Team the Latitude of Working Autonomously

The most perceptible upside of the nearshore team is its independence. Therefore, do not do anything that would demoralize the team or lower their morale, which would lead to a dilatory app development process. So, avoid micromanaging your nearshore team that’s causative of a huge time-sink and is also a hard habit to break. Instead, you may prioritize a regular reporting system to stay updated consistently regarding the project development.

Concluding Statements

Hiring a nearshore software development team essentially helps you manage your project development effectively. Moreover, it also helps you work with talented specialists to help you realize the dream of your unique project idea. Ideas shared above would help you broaden your horizon on a nearshore software development team, with insights into how to choose the right one for your project, benefits, and most importantly, how to manage your nearshore developer to get the most out of it.

Do you need technical experts for software development?

Binmile is a trusted software development company with a global reputation offering comprehensive solutions in software and product development. Equipped with cutting-edge technologies, a tech stack, and a team of highly experienced IT specialists, we offer futuristic software solutions, helping you in every stage of your software development lifecycle.

Author

Arun Kumar Sharma

AVP - Technology