Building & Managing Remote Global Team

Posted: July 8th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Startup |

Building a team is a hard problem, building a good to great team even harder and throw in the idea of a good remote team and now we are talking an activity that is harder and fraught with higher risk and imbued with additional administrative issues that would normally put it out of the reach of any sane startup

Well ODesk to the rescue, sort of.

First an important but irritating caveat that though hopefully implied, I still wish to state explicitly. In my opinion, there is no tool or service out in the marketplace and non expected soon or in our lifetime that deterministically leads one to spin up an “A” like Team especially in the technology development arena. Unfortunately, most of Technology recruitment still and probably always will rely solely on the weight of different technologies you can stuff on a maximum two page resume and which will hopefully ;for the candidate that is ;game whatever keyword sniffing tool they have looking for specific stated technology experiences.

Caveat aside, Odesk is a network of individuals and an application set that provides an infrastructure for building virtual teams.
It is a company , this is no open source amalgamation of systems and people and as in most if not all “body” shop or freelance organizations, it takes a cut of the wage or rate paid to it’s members.

If you are on the demand side of the equation, the commission is well worth it as it offers

• Work Task definition and opening it up for bid from the community of Odesk Freelancers
• Validating work effort (not work product but effort. Are they working when they say they are)
• Payment in non local currencies
• invoicing and payment. The payment is via Credit Card which is perfect for a startup
• Managing Work Flow and communications within the team

The value proposition for Odesk centers around the network of potential team members scattered throughout the world with varying degrees of competency and passion that it pools for someone building a team. Additionally it provides the tooling to define your needs ie work orders, broadcast those needs to the network of Odesk connected potential, sift through the responses and work it till you find the right individual(s) to engage and then manage the assignment over time including the intricacies of payment, conflict resolution, add-on work etc.

Though the core technology architecture and development is not outsourced in this manor at Jittr, we do look to Odesk for staffing various aspects of Design, for instance crafting the various image artifacts with the standard scale and layout for iPhone and Android applications as well as test engineering on various representative handsets for the smartphone applications we develop.

I do want to take this opportunity to state a stirring in my mind that occurs as I avail Jittr of the talents of people in various roles throughout the world. The average wage rage for professional services in the Technology Development area which is a high paying area relatively speaking in all countries is abysmally low when compared to USA wage rates. I pay my cleaning person more per hour then an experienced though way remote individual Senior Software Engineer who’s local currency is in India rupees.
Furthermore, though my main focus is on software engineering talent, I am nibbling at Designers, Product people and other roles and there are a multitude of non technical types that can be engaged via Odesk.
What will be the eventual end state for various professions here in the USA with this evolving network of remote/ low cost professionals available relatively quickly? Well, hopefully it will all boil down to quality in the end.
I will update this post as the evolution of my team building and execution proceeds through the use of Odesk and comparable networks and Systems like Elance.

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