The remote development team is acting like you have the same in the office: development tools, sprint planning, review and deployment code, monitoring – it all works equally at any distance. The only thing that is more difficult in a distributed team – is communication: the developers do not have the feeling of your office atmosphere, which helps everyone to be in the same environment.

Imagine that your company is changing its corporate identity, and you set the programmers to change the header in corporate documents. If the team is facing the gap with understanding, they will change the logo only in printed documents, but the PDF forms that you use in communication with partners, will be remaining the same, as the programmer simply does not know that you have such functionality in the system.

To facilitate communication in a remote team – you should standardize it. First, when setting tasks, pay less attention to specific solutions – it is better to describe the final goal. Instead of a detailed list of print forms, describe to programmers what a new corporate identity is needed for, and which customers should first see it. If a good engineer will not find a list of forms, he will talk to colleagues, then compile the task and show you.

Secondly, ask the programmers to be as detailed as possible – let the solution to each task contain a simple presentation like “before-after”. This practice helps performers to look at the task through the eyes of the manager – this prevents the tasks from throwing them back and forth when the programmer says he did, and the designer returns with the words that nothing works.

Let your guys to see the “big picture”, feel their involvement and share their knowledge. For that purpose, this is a great idea to arrange “strategic sessions” once a month – get together whole team and tell them what’s new in business and let you r team to share their latest news.

One of the best options for the remote team is to have the Project Manager together with them as a part of the team. This is manager who knows them and may deliver you the news faster and help to set up all the environment. Usually Project Manager is a person who may perform as a great point of contact and ‘translate’ your ideas and goals to the development team. Ask for the Project Management service when you feel that this is hard to perform the management from your perspective.