Category: Software

The world has changed a lot in 2020, and many businesses have been forced to go remote. This situation wasn’t temporary. In fact, as many as 74% of businesses predicted in 2020 that they will transition their on-site employees into remote positions even after the pandemic is over, and we can still see that most companies continue to work in the remote model.

There are many benefits of having a remote workforce, but also a lot of challenges – such as project management. Handling your team in the office when everyone is in the same building is one thing, but keeping everything together when each team member works remotely is another.

In this article, I’ll highlight the main project management challenges facing remote teams, and also offer a few strategies that show you how to overcome them.

Top project management problems

People problems caused by poor communication

Communication among team members is a challenge faced by all remote teams around the world. Because good communication is paramount to the success of any business, it’s really important that you find ways of overcoming this hurdle.

The challenges lie largely with the fact that your team may have different preferences for communicating now that they’re remote, as well as the fact that some of them may become more inaccessible.

This can lead to a slowdown in overall performance, as well as a feeling of disconnect. It can also lead to misunderstandings. According to a recently conducted survey, the biggest project management challenge falls under people problems.

Communication among team members is a challenge faced by all remote teams around the world. Because good communication is paramount to the success of any business, it’s really important that you find ways of overcoming this hurdle.

The challenges lie largely with the fact that your team may have different preferences for communicating now that they’re remote, as well as the fact that some of them may become more inaccessible.

This can lead to a slowdown in overall performance, as well as a feeling of disconnect. It can also lead to misunderstandings. According to a recently conducted survey, the biggest project management challenge falls under people problems.

With 14 years on the market, we have gained valuable expertise in various areas. Read more about what we excel at.

The most important thing you should do is provide your remote team with effective communication tools. There are different types of tools you can use for different needs. For example, you could build a customized chat app, which is ideal for real-time messaging and chatting about a project. 

Slack, on the other hand, maybe better for sharing files, group chats, as well as video calls. It also lets your team send GIFs, which can be great for informal discussions about your projects. 

As well as establishing communication channels, you could also schedule frequent ‘catch-ups’. This helps your team to stay connected, it gives them a voice and it can encourage them to share their ideas with the group.

Identify the most important tasks and avoid the worst pitfalls when starting a new digital project with our handy checklist:

Lack of performance tracking

Now that your team is working remotely, it can be a lot harder to track their performance. Poor performance tracking can cause delays if all you’re seeing is a team member’s finished work. Deadlines may be missed, and the finished work may not be of an acceptable standard.

It’s a tough situation because micromanagement is not only a poor solution, it’s also impractical with remote teams.

The best way to hold your remote team accountable and boost performance tracking is to first implement frequent performance discussions. These will give you the chance to chat with team members 1:1 to find out where they are in a project. You can also ask them about any challenges they’re currently facing, and what you can do to help.

You can also use tools to help you monitor your team’s productivity. Performance tracking tools include HiveDesk, which comes with a useful random screen sampling feature, and TSheets, which gives your remote workforce a variety of ways to clock in and out. Therefore, there can be no shirking.

Dealing with time zone differences

Now that your team is remote, it may be tempting to hire additional team members that are located overseas. This can improve the caliber of your employees because it means you’ve got more candidates to choose from, but it also means you’ll have to wrestle with time zone differences.

Time differences can cause major delays in projects. For example, if one team member needs something from another team member before they can move forward with a task, but the other team member has just gone to bed, there will be a lengthy delay.

The easiest way to fix this problem is to simply ask your team members to be more flexible with their working schedules. However, this may not always be possible. In that event, you can use scheduling tools, such as, Calendly, to make sure that work is assigned and delivered at times that suit everyone.

When it comes to things like team meetings, you will need to ask your team for feedback in regards to what times suit everyone. If there is no way that you can agree on a time, the next best thing to do is to record your team meetings. This way, anyone who misses the live meeting won’t miss out completely.

Procrastination

One of the problems faced by remote teams is the temptation to procrastinate. While studies have shown that working remotely can boost productivity, we need to offset this with the fact that there may be team members who put work off until the last minute simply because they’re not in an office environment. As a result, your projects can slow down.

A solution is to educate your team members on the need to create a daily plan. As well as a written plan, you can break all tasks down into smaller ones on your project management tools, so that your team doesn’t become overwhelmed. Other things you could do is remind your team that they don’t need to always aim for perfection. You could utilize a work management tool like Asana that will give their day some much-needed structure and framework.

Top project management problems – conclusion

Good project management is central to the success of your remote team. Use the tips in this article to get to grips with the way your team communicates and performs. Make sure to use tools where possible to help you along the way, and don’t underestimate the importance of talking to each team member one-to-one as often as possible.

Kick off your digital project on the right foot with our checklist

The “Project Management Checklist: Before you start” is our guarantee that the project will be kicked off in the best way possible, and no important issue will be omitted. The list has been divided into several fields, though there is a chronological feel to it as well, the sequence is not necessarily set in stone. You can download it here.

Ready to start your digital project with us? Drop us a line and one of our colleagues will contact you shortly.

Author Bio

Michelle Deery is a content writer with over eight years of experience. She specializes in writing content for SaaS companies. The words she writes convert readers into paying customers. Learn more at michelledeery.com and connect with her on Twitter @MichWriting.

Before you dive headfirst into a software development project, it’s important to keep a few things in mind when you’re working with an external partner. Software projects not only need engagement from a development team, but also from you, the so-called product owner.

Product owners are the main points of contact on the client side. They direct development, give feedback and can make application development run smoothly. If you find yourself in the product owner role, be ready to devote time for planning, analyzing, and discussing the product roadmap with your development team. 

Hiring a development team

A client should take time to hammer out many of the aspects of a product before the project starts. First of all, he has to look for a professional software provider. It may be tempting to race to the bottom on price, but balancing price and quality is a key consideration. If you don’t have internal programming resources already, you’ll need to spend some time looking for the right provider. Finding the best delivery partner can be time-consuming and needs a lot of effort. And that’s only the first step.

Legalities and a product brief

Once you’ve found a perfect development partner, the next step is to negotiate all the legalities and sign a contract. It also needs effort on the client’s site.  You need to determine the project scope, define the application’s features, and describe the expected result. Here’s our guide on how to get an accurate cost estimate and to allow the IT team to understand how the application should work and what features it has to cover.

Defining the application’s scope and estimate

Clients describe their vision in many different ways. Some of them compare their idea to some tools that already exist on the market and have similar features.  It’s very common for clients to have an app in mind that they’d like us to emulate. For us, it’s a nice way to get the first feeling of a solution we’ll build. In the second stage, we ask additional questions to get a more detailed understanding of an idea and its full range.

Some clients already have examples of the mock-ups or even sketches of their preliminary idea. They prepare information about the business value and show how the future product will support the vision.

It’s very helpful for the product owner and the development team to agree on as much detail as possible before a project starts.  But without a technology background and project experience, it’s not easy for many clients to define the detailed product vision. That’s why we offer our clients product design workshops as the first step of work on the application. These workshops clarify all product details in its technology and business aspects. We advise on features to be chosen for an MVP, define usability that meets target groups needs, and prepare an application prototype which very often is necessary to convince investors/sponsors to support a project.

In our workshops, we spend a few days together discussing the vision of the project about the features of some use cases about the business itself.  So there is a moment in which the client should teach us about his vision should convey to us as much information as possible here in order for us to understand the project and to estimate it. So that’s a lot of effort and our clients really need to allocate some time to determine all the details and the common point of view relevant the product and its vision.

We need to ask a lot of questions to digest the information that we learned and come back with follow-up questions. We engage clients in this somewhat intensive process. While it sometimes takes quite a long time, the finished product will be what you want. In order to get professional service, you’ll have to set aside time to get everything right.

Workshop preparation for application development project

Once you decide on taking the product design workshop, here’s what you should expect.  So, in case of meeting with one person which represents the whole company, he should be well prepared. He must have knowledge both from the business and technology side. It is really important if the person is meeting us only alone in person or if it’s a kind of company project where there are more stakeholders.

Understanding all sides of the project and achieving all the knowledge needed could be very time-consuming. The whole team needs to meet together in the same room for a few hours, clearly defining the future product functionality cannot be overestimated.

Product owner role

We work in the scrum methodology, so we have to choose a person who will be responsible for the application development project. We don’t usually allocate the product owner on our side. Scrum assumes that there is a development team, but there is also the role of a product owner who is in charge of deciding which features are in the system. He or she has to know everything about the product and answer any questions about how developers should implement features. The product owner is able to respond to all questions about the product, system and also business background.

It’s better for the clients to have a person on their side who has a very strong industry background and a great understanding of the client’s business niche. Working as a delivery team we can perfectly recommend the technology, UX, and many other aspects but at the beginning, we need to acquire the domain knowledge from the client’s business.

A product owner must answer questions that arise throughout the project. He or she needs to respond quickly enough not to create a bottleneck. In order to avoid sending a single question, we organize so-called backlog groomings or backlog refinements. These are meetings where the goal is to explain the backlog to the team and discuss with the development team all the upcoming tasks trying to find out all these questions before we start the implementation of a given feature. This kind of meeting usually lasts much longer at the beginning of the project and then we keep these meetings regularly every week or every two weeks depends on the length of the sprint just to refine the next stories on the list. This way can be on the right track with all client’s needs with the minimum effort from the client’s side to run the project on time and within budget.

One example here is our project for The Guardian Soulmates app. The company had a dedicated business owner in London who took care of the business. She also set the roadmap for the system in terms of business and discussed priorities and features with us. All the process is led over Slack — both sites are this way very responsive and the communication was quick and efficient. We run planning sessions together and groomings to set up what should be done in the next sprints.

Product owner engagement as a success factor in an application development project

Of course, there are clients who do not want to engage so much in the project. They just want to write down specifications then want the software provider to learn and understand their business enough to ask all the questions that appear during the development process.

We try to discourage clients from that kind of approach, but if there is still a need on the client’s side to pass us the product owner role, we try to adjust and prepare for the role as much as we can. Then we only need a contact person on the company’s side to decide about the next step of the project. That is why we always try to encourage our clients to consider this team spirit type of arrangement and be ready for some serious involvement on their side.

Conclusion

As you start your software development project, be sure to prepare to work with your software development team to get the best possible outcome. Do your research and hire a software partner that will be open and honest with you and who has a history of excellent work. Assign a product owner who knows the ins and outs of the project and is ready to work closely with developers. Devote time and effort to get everything in order and finally, take the plunge.