5 Rules of Remote Project Management

How to understand your client, why it’s important to write everything down and what are the advantages of perfectionist managers

CSSSR doesn’t have an office and will never have one, while our team consists of dozens of people, who are sometimes located halfway across the world from each other. Nevertheless, all of them are officially employed and work full-time.

For more than 6 years we’ve been developing front-end: methodically writing HTML/CSS, courageously implementing complicated JavaScript code, meticulously testing — all completely remotely.

Through years of experience we’ve defined 5 main precepts of remote management.

1. What is not written down — does not exist

For us Internet is the main and only space for communication with a client. Therefore the rule of “putting verbal agreements in writing” has a special meaning for our team.

We don’t mean forcing clients into writing 5 screen letters. It’s enough to extract client’s expectations from a conversation and convert them into a text file. Using online tools allows to work on a document together and quickly make necessary corrections.

Let’s say a client came for advice about choosing a CMS. Hot Skype discussion, various implementation alternatives, no single decision — and the call comes to nothing. In such a case what we do is, we take a pause to sum up pros and cons, discuss it, put it into shape, figure out client’s request and form a document. Text format will help to keep the head clear and structurize information, as well as giving opportunity to the client to compare the results and choose the most appropriate option.

The process of writing such a document is important as well: here comes team experience, critical questioning and pitfalls detection. Also while working with an analytic text it is easier to consider every important detail and not miss anything out.

2. Feedback collection is an art

Feedback and dialogue are true investments into relationships — both personal and professional. It’s a grown-up approach, which is able to reveal pains and gains and cut to the chase of a problem.

It’s not always easy. Try to remember what you feel when giving a feedback on someone’s work. Does it feel comfortable to express your request directly? Do you always know how to describe your concerns? If the answer is “no”, it’s normal.

We’ve completed more than 450 projects over 6 years and we know which questions should be asked to get an outstanding outcome — even if the client doesn’t know yet what he wants to see as a result.

Nevertheless feedback collection doesn’t require filling out a survey form every week. On each key point or a project stage we take a moment to talk up the current issues with the client. It becomes clear if all the milestones are transparent enough and what is needed to be brought in to hit the target.

Here are some situations where conversation skills will help to avoid most problems:

The first, and the easiest case — a client knows what he is unhappy with and comes to discuss the problem in a calm atmosphere.

The second situation — the client doesn’t express the crux of the matter and randomly complains about other factors. For example, saying that amount of work hours in performance report is overestimated. It is far from certain that the report is the main problem. The real reason may lie in internal delays that were not discussed before setting the task, or lack of project funding. In other words, the client has difficulties that we have unknowingly exacerbated.

And finally the third situation, and the most challenging one. The client keeps silent. All the time. He is hard to reach to specify timelines and project specifications. If you are doing something wrong, you will find it out too late. And this case requires high-class account management.

In such cases scheduling regular voice discussions might help to establish productive relations. Once a week would be enough.

Our alternative (or additional) measure — daily brief report about the work done during the day. It takes not more than 10–15 minutes to look into such letter. All the problems that block the whole process and can not be solved autonomously are must-mention. It allows to find problems and offer possible solutions before the situation becomes critical.

3. Reputation can not be won or bought…

… But can be earned. Remote team has to pay three times more attention to details on every stage, from the very first contact. Even if a client “just looking around”, we are ready to help with opinion, advice, expertise, or recommend a suitable partner. We formed and adopted that culture of request processing when you stay a live person with every client instead of turning into an answering machine.

Transparency is another principle for remote workers. We thoroughly describe all the details for any project — whether with $300 or $30,000 budget. Our main advice to remote companies is to freely disclose your pricing strategy.

Finally, for the love of details, make every offline contact with the client special. Unified guidelines for financial documents, craft paper envelopes instead of usual white ones, design of business cards, stickers and posters – every little thing can be made with love and attention.

4. Team synchronization is always a pain point, but it matters

All people can be divided into two categories: the ones who can work remotely and the ones this concept definitely doesn’t work for. The easiest ways to find out whether a candidate can fit into our frameworks are: to give a simple test task and to talk about motivation, benefits and disadvantages of remote work.

Practice has shown that remote work itself can be an element of motivation, for example for introverts. In our experience it takes lots of self-control, discipline and apparently a special “gene” to work remotely not worse than in the office and avoid procrastination. Moreover, to build cohesive remote workflow with, for the most part, introverts is a tall order.

One efficient way to synchronize a team is common courtesy: we say “hello” to each other in the morning, inform when going for lunch and say “goodbye” before leaving the workspace. We discuss not only work — there are chats to talk about online games, camping, puppies and any other interests.

5. Uncompromising thoroughness is a must-have personal characteristic

A good manager is the one who can make sense of a message and convey it unmistakably in 100 out of 100 cases. One may compare this work with a responsibility of cooperation between ground control and a pilot landing a plane. This is why it is twice harder to find a good project manager for a remote team.

In our practice we hire only one or two managers out of 500 applicants. Most of candidates get out of the game because of inability to get their point across, correctly understand and accurately transfer given information. Some helpful ways to select the most capable candidates are written test task and Skype interview using practical case-solving to test agility and perspicacity.

Perfectionism is one of the main requirements for manager position, so as a test you can ask a candidate to edit and format a short sample contract. Inattention to trivial details such as capitalization or apostrophes is a good “input filter”.

CSSSR is a large outsource team of IT-engineers working hard yet completely remotely across the world. We specialize in developing data-intensive web applications, including online banking systems, payment interfaces, sales and brokerage platforms, customer portals for airline companies, and websites for mobile network operators. Connect with us here.