With each passing year, the popularity of a distributed development model expands, and so does the number of businesses that support remote development teams. According to recent studies, remote work may overtake in-office hires by 2025.

However, are we clued in to why remote teams are becoming the norm?

Many businesses have adopted distributed teams because they offer benefits such as a more reliable, cost-effective, and efficient approach to managing a larger pool of talent (or a niche one) from across the world.

Well, if you too want to learn how to manage and scale software development remote teams, you can pick certain aspects about distributed teams from this blog.

 

What do Distributed Teams Look Like?

The term "distributed team" refers to individuals who work from different places. This could entail individuals working from home from anywhere in the world or working in an office with no other team members nearby.

That could mean that your coder is working in a hammock in South East Asia while your QA and Project Manager plugin from Boston, or London.

 

‘Distributed’ is the key.

Remote workers scattered across the globe. Although Distributed is a tad bit different from Remote teams.

Generally, remote workers are more satisfied with their jobs according to distributed team statistics and are viable to stay with a company that offers remote work alternatives or flexible work hours. As a result, distributed teams have a greater rate of retention. And thus a preference for businesses and employees alike.

Team members work as a cohesive unit despite not having a proximal experience with each other. Although distributed teams are frequently used to establish flexible work, this does not always imply that team members will benefit from work flexibility.

 


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The Benefits of Distributed Teams in Software Projects

To help their remote team members function efficiently, managers and enterprises can use best practices and approaches. Here's how a distributed team approach might benefit a company.

 

Access to a Vetted Talent Pool

According to studies, by 2021, the technical market in the United States would be severely short of engineers. Recruiting talent will become an even more challenging and costly task for organizations that refuse to go remote, giving distributed development teams even more advantages.

You don't have to look for local talent while working with distributed development teams. By obtaining access to a limitless pool of technical experts worldwide, businesses can pick the developers they need.

As referenced in the example above, your coder, project manager, QA, and other indispensable members can work from anywhere and be from anywhere. Provided you have a grip on collaboration and coordination.

You can diversify your workforce by bringing in talent from other countries, which can assist you in adopting and implementing new innovative ideas.

Upwork projects that 73% of companies will be using distributed teams by 2028.

 

Productivity Enhancements

You'll have more professionals to pick from if you have access to a global talent pool, and providing your development team with expertise will undoubtedly improve overall productivity.

Furthermore, according to Stanford University research, employees who work from a distance are as efficient as or more efficient than those who work on-site. This is because remote employees use fewer sick days and take shorter breaks, they have a lower attrition rate and work more hours per year.

 

A Larger Audience Reach

Hiring employees from all around the world improves the efficiency of your company. An organization can intentionally enhance its daily working hours and have at least one team ready at all times by having personnel in multiple time zones.

This works especially well if your coder works in a different timezone as your tester.
The coding and testing process thus runs simultaneously in parallel sprints. Works wonders if you’re working on stacks that have a Hot reload feature in development.

 

Employee Retention & Satisfaction

Many employees prefer flexible working hours and a lack of on-site commitment. Most successful businesses nowadays allow their employees to work from home. Your organization can start focusing on the results and efficacy of each worker instead of their geographical location during work hours with remote development teams.

According to PGI research, 82 percent of remote workers experience far less stress than their office counterparts, resulting in higher retention and productivity.

 

Reduction in Office Requirements

In a traditional office, a larger team requires more space. Everyone requires a cubicle or office, computer hardware/software, access to restrooms, and many other facilities. Your location requires sufficient parking, climate control, and IT infrastructure.

These requirements are significantly reduced while working in a distributed team. What used to take up a whole level of an office building, may now only require a couple of rooms and a properly distributed workforce. Many modern enterprises employ dozens of people and operate from a two-bedroom flat.

 

Support Cloud Applications & Save Money on IT

IT expenditures are decreasing as cloud services and software become more common. You're no longer required to keep your team's infrastructure on-premises.

A managed service provider (MSP) can help your organization with hardware, while cloud services can help with everything from storage to accounting and development environments. Thus, running a distributed team is often less expensive than running an exclusively on-premises staff.

 

Tips for Distributed Team to Enhance Collaboration & Productivity

A distributed team model can run the whole team as a basic knowledge of management skills is a must to build a strong task management system. Consider the following to get started:

●Maintain a flexible working hours schedule.
●Using an agile strategy to team collaboration.
●Setting up virtual social hours to encourage team meetings for discussing projects, giving feedback, and celebrating even small milestones.
●Select a system with multiple workflow alternatives to enable distributed team’s working style.
●Allow calendar integration & enable team/client/manager to view the project progress with the timeline.
●Integrate a system with Dropbox, Zapier, or Harvest, among other app integration tools.

 

To Wrap Up

Distributed teams are now considered the 'future of work'.

If businesses are to thrive in these uncertain times, they would have to think outside the box and move away from the old method of working.

If you want to develop a flexible team for your company, you should consider hiring a distributed team.

Finding the appropriate people and tools is key to building a distributed team while managing the team necessitates efficient processes and positive team collaboration. The aforementioned ways demonstrate how a distributed team can help you meet your software project deadlines and build a productive work environment.

 

 

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Author Details:

Anup Mehrotra is the Vice President of Sales, Marketing & Partnerships for Netsmartz and Envision e-Commerce. His expertise in building strategic partnerships, software product/service marketing, and demand/lead generation is focused on helping budding entrepreneurs build quality products fast. In his leisure time, he likes to read and write about software development and marketing.