Software development work is the one task that most commonly gets outsourced to offshore destinations – India in particular. Indian software professionals have made a name for themselves, having flexed their IT muscles and wowed the Silicon Valley decades earlier. Recent surveys have shown that a whopping 85 percent of software companies in the US would prefer to outsource to India as their first choice.
Offshore outsourcing is always a bit of a tricky proposition, involving as it does several layers of action that need to be based on mutual trust and commitment to a common goal. So, even after you have offshore outsourced your software development work to India, how are you keeping track of it? This naturally does not refer to offshore freelancing in which case keeping track of work is possible but in an erratic fashion and probably not in the manner desired by you. Keeping track of work is possible only if you have chosen to outsource to an established vendor who provides you with your very own dedicated virtual or remote employee.
Outsourcing certainly doesn't mean sitting back and letting the virtual employee handle everything. Tracking their work and performance is a must and there are many ways in which this can be done. 1. At the outset itself, set achievable and realistic goals and targets for your virtual software developer. This could be daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on the nature of the work. Let them know that you would be closely monitoring their progress and requiring explanations if deadlines aren't met. A virtual employee that is made accountable for their work will make sure that their performance under no way comes under the scanner. 2. If your software developer is apart of the larger virtual team that you have hired and needs to work and collaborate closely with the other members, ensure that lines of communication between them are clearly established and open at all times. 3. If possible, eliminate the use of email between your team members, and keep everything tracked inside the project management system. For example, all work being done can be stored in Goggle Docs and each day's work gets updates, you and your virtual team know exactly just at which stage the project is at any given time. 4. If you wish, you may even make use of an automated tracking software. Each one of your team members, that is the virtual employees, would have a special program installed on their individual PCs or laptops. During working hours their system would automatically send tracking reports to the client to save time. Similarly, at the end of each day or week, consolidated reports would be sent to the client showing what tasks the employee or virtual team have completed and how productive their work has been during the hours worked. This software also creates a log of every activity of an employee – for how long the mouse was idle, for how long the monitor was idle and so on. A client can manage the productivity output, all without their physical intervention apart from initially setting it up. There are other software such as Team Viewer that helps a client to actually see the screen of their virtual employee. Whatever they are working on will be displayed in real time on the client's screen.
So, thanks to technology, it is indeed now easy to keep track of your outsourced software development work.
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