How to get the best value from remote engineering teams

The rise of remote work has brought a lot of changes to business operations, but for companies used to working with remote engineering teams, not that much actually changed.

At Agiledrop, we’ve been collaborating remotely with our clients for 12+ years, and have established best practices long before remote collaboration became the norm. In this article, we’d like to share these practices and key lessons from providing remote engineering teams for clients such as the European Commission and UNESCO.

How to get the best results from working with remote engineering teams

Here are our 10 best practices for optimal collaboration between remote and on-site teams.

1. Good communication

Establish good communication with the remote team, on robust channels that allow both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Efficient async communication is particularly important if you’re working across different time zones.

2. Thorough onboarding and integration into existing workflows

Make sure that your remote engineers are properly onboarded and that they adopt your internal tooling and workflows. This is a no-brainer with in-house remote engineers, but you should also require and facilitate proper onboarding for a remote team provided by your engineering partner.

3. Developer experience

For optimal performance and productivity of engineers, you should heavily prioritize and invest into a good developer experience. This includes obvious things such as adequate hardware and software, but also psychological safety, experienced engineering management that can help mentor and onboard new team members, and other people/culture aspects.

4. Work-life balance

A healthy work-life balance is one of the best ways to support productivity and performance without risking burnout. Software engineering is an area with a unique approach to problem solving, and introducing a structure that’s too rigid and/or involves frequent unplanned overtime can hinder this process and negatively impact productivity in the long run.

5. Good documentation

Poor documentation is the one challenge most frequently highlighted by Agiledrop’s engineers when discussing their remote collaboration with clients’ internal engineering teams.

As an integral part of good communication and developer experience, documentation needs to be user-friendly, accessible and regularly updated to enable everyone to effectively join the project, and to facilitate collaboration between in-house and remote team members.

It’s even more important with remote engineering teams where you miss out on casual in-person conversations with team mates that tend to not get documented anywhere with strictly in-house work.

6. Standardization of tools

While some freedom over the tooling used is important for a positive developer experience, a certain degree of standardization is necessary to ensure optimal collaboration, and prevent bottlenecks and silos.

When it comes to something like AI code assistants, it’s wise to standardize on a single one, or at least a single one for each specific project, especially if it’s a custom tool or integration, and in particular when used for business critical code to maintain privacy. With tools such as IDEs, it’s okay to give engineers more freedom.

7. Good project management

Whether your remote engineering team is internally managed or self-managed (e.g. in the case of a partnership with an engineering company that provides its own project managers alongside the engineering team), good project management is essential to success.

Empathy, diplomacy and conflict resolution are essential skills for project managers to facilitate collaboration between in-house and remote teams, and successfully align all stakeholders towards common goals.

8. Clearly defined business values and project goals

Speaking of alignment on common goals, these need to be clearly defined upfront and everyone involved in the particular project needs to be familiarized with them. The same is true for broader business values; even an outsourced engineering team should have a keen understanding of your core values and how they relate to the goals of the project at hand.

9. Support of independence and proactiveness

While you’ll of course want your engineering team to optimally collaborate with other stakeholders, some degree of autonomy and independence is essential for the process to remain agile. Independence also opens the door to proactiveness and enables more efficient solutioning, which is key in a field such as engineering.

With a remote engineering team that is self-managed, support of independence is basically a must, especially when working across multiple different time zones. It allows development to progress smoothly, without bottlenecks.

10. Smart partner selection

When entrusting engineering to a remote engineering partner rather than keeping it exclusively in-house, it’s crucial to do a thorough selection of the optimal partner to ensure the best fit. You’ll most likely want an engineering company that you can form a long term partnership with, so that you don’t have to search for a new partner for every individual project.

In closing

We hope this article will help you get more value from your remote engineering teams, whether they’re in-house teams or remote dedicated teams provided by your engineering partner.

The best results come when all of these practices are employed together (e.g. clearly defined goals and good documentation foster a good developer experience and support proactiveness). So, make sure you’re mindful of all 10 practices to ensure maximum effectiveness of each individual one.

In case you’re searching for a remote engineering partner right now, have a look at what it’s like working with Agiledrop’s engineering teams, and feel free to reach out to us directly if you have any specific questions.