I had the great fortune of spending some time with Paul Maximov, owner of Cyberian Soft at Orange County’s Largest Mixer. He shared some essential tips on managing his nine person programming team in the Ukraine.
1. Have a Good Team
The two main methods of finding quality programmers is word of mouth and through establishing relationships through experience.
Pay up to 40% more than the market price, which you can find out by looking at local job boards.
Create cash bonuses based on value-added productivity that is pre-defined. This results in improved motivation, less subjectivity and less competition among developers.
An example is to use subjective value based incentives such as: “I’ll pay $100 for the implementation of feature X”. Then at the end of the month, you determine the time spent by each developer on the feature and split the bonus accordingly.
Foster innovation by providing bonuses for great ideas that get implemented.
2. Use Tools to Monitor and Implement Processes
You must be able to:
- monitor progress
- report problems, escalate problems
- check ins should be referenced with tasks
- automated regression testing
- nightly builds
- attach responsibility to each task
- automatically receive notification of red flags (pre-defined indicators of performance and problems)
He currently uses Team Foundation Server (TPS) and SharePoint as the backbone, with custom modules that implement SCRUM and monitor how much time is spend on each task. TPS does not natively support time tracking.
To motivate the developers to use the system properly, attach the bonuses and pay to its usage.
3. Open Communications
Transparency and eliminating bottlenecks is key.
Define communication process and utilize tools to facilitate those process.
Do you have any tips for offshoring?
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