Managing a remote team is not easy. There are critical mistakes one can make when trying to leverage the vast amounts of remote talent.

The solution: Communication, lots of it. Constant communication makes sure there can be absolutely no surprise breaks in execution.

Simform team integrates into your team, participating in standup and scrum meetings, weekly demos, weekly retrospectives.

Daily stand-ups

We do daily stand-ups where everyone gets on a video chat and tells you what they are working on that day and the previous day.
The Agile methodology calls for each contributor to go around, talk about what they’ve been working on, what they will be working on, estimate how long it’s going to take them, whether there are any critical blockers that could cause delay, and what their bandwidth looks like. These stand-ups are rigorously tracked by the Tech Lead.

But we do not just rely on unstructured communication. Everyone at Simform uses PPP (progress, plans, problems) methodology which is used at companies like Facebook, Google, eBay, Skype, etc. PPP is used to detail progress, issues, thoughts, and anything else pertaining to their tasks.

Weekly demonstrations

This one is simple: get everybody on a video chat, share screens, have people show their work, and then talk about it.

Weekly Retrospectives

A weekly retrospective is where you all collectively review what went well and what could have been improved based on the demo.

We use the lean method of holding a meeting. It is great because it gives everyone a voice—there’s an element of democracy in the development process now. You’re still “the boss” but everybody now has some skin in the game. This will also help to organically create a culture within your remote team—something we will cover at length in a future post.