Is Managing an Outsourced Team That Challenging?

Effective management is crucial for every team. Here are some basic principles to keep in mind if you want to build an efficient long-lasting relationship.  

• Set clear goals. Explain the important details of your product to the team.
• Stay in communication with the QA team. Ask for progress updates. Check reports. Ask questions if something is unclear. 
• Set realistic expectations & deadlines. Remember that the independent vendor is a business, too, with the processes, projects, and workload. Deadlines are something to be negotiated.
• 100% bug-free software is never achievable (though we aim to). Estimate overall software quality, not the quantity of non-critical bugs.

The efficiency of the team depends on the contract terms and ability of both sides to adopt the working processes quickly. Very often, companies that consider a shift to outsourcing are concerned about the discipline of a remote QA team. This is unnecessary. Of course, you don’t get to see those QA specialists in the office every day, but we do. 

An outsourcing company doesn’t just assign a QA engineer to work on your project and then forgets about it. There is always a manager on our side who supervises big teams. If there are only a few QA engineers working on a project, a client can decide whether to assign an in-house manager or we will assign ours. Besides, discipline and personal leadership are among the most important requirements for every candidate we hire.

Discover more outsourcing and post-crisis tips in our latest article.