What Is an Offshore Development Center (ODC) and How to Set It Up Effectively?

Many people believe that an offshore development center is vulnerable to leakage of project and company details. Security is the most common challenge that makes many people abandon the idea of setting up an offshore development center.

Solution. Indeed, it's hard to be sure your private data is safe, especially at a distance. Fortunately, there are some practical ways to make sure that you're dealing with a reliable offshore team.

Before concluding a contract, you can check your vendor on trustworthy directories like Clutch or G2 to see previous clients' ratings and reviews. Feel free to ask for the team's portfolio to make sure of their expertise and professionalism. You can also study your offshore team on sites like GitHub, Dribble, and Behance to ensure they have real projects. One more effective way to protect your data is to conclude a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This agreement implies establishing the confidentiality of any data the involved parties share.

At first sight, the cultural gap may not seem the most crucial challenge in cooperation with an offshore development team. Lack of cultural diversity can considerably influence the overall working process.

Your offshore team's cultural environment influences their personal and business values, how they make business decisions, how they solve problems and cooperate with others.

Solution. To avoid cultural barriers, you can personally interact with your offshore team and discuss your vision with them. Thus, you get everything clear with every member of the team and stay on the same page. To make your work more productive, you can conduct workshops or do team-building exercises. All these activities will help you avoid cultural barriers with your ODC team.

According to GoodFirms, 31 percent of respondents claim that time zone differences are a considerable offshoring risk. Well, when planning meetings with your ODC team, you should bear time zone differences in mind. Your offshore team can also celebrate a national holiday while you have a usual workday. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Solution. It's necessary to discuss the work schedule with your remote team at the beginning of your cooperation. Eventually, you can find an offshore team that shares your time zone or team with a minor time difference.

Moreover, see the positive side of this challenge. For example, if your head office is in London and ODC is in Los Angeles, your business can work 24/7 due to a significant time gap. So while you're sleeping, your offshore team is meeting all deadlines.

It's better to think in advance about how to work with offshore team. It's hard to control the development process and stay up to date on project progress when your team isn't at your fingertips. But this does not necessarily mean that there is no way to overcome this challenge. Solution. If you want to have as full control as possible, you should choose the BOT model. Eventually, you'll get 100% control over your offshore center and intellectual product legally. Using other models, you should be interested in the product development process at the very start of your cooperation. You can hold regular daily calls to stay informed of current tasks. One more way to track progress is to ask a team to prepare detailed reports on product development results with all required details. All of this can help you supervise the product development results and keep the working process transparent.

Setting up an offshore development center may seem a complicated task. However, you can avoid all pitfalls in dealing with an ODC team by following the above best practices. We believe that regular communication and a transparent working process are essential to successful and effective offshore team management. Ready to build an offshore development center? Contact Fayrix and get a reliable technical partner that helps you develop a robust product on time and within budget.