Today’s tech entrepreneurs are well aware that reliable and software development services highly qualified programmers and other technical personnel pretty much have their pick of employers. Companies willing to meet salary and lifestyle requirements for top talent are increasingly finding that a strong preference for remote work is part of employment negotiations. The remote work genie was already out of the bottle long before the Covid-19 pandemic emptied office buildings worldwide. While many companies could adjust to most, perhaps all, of their employees working from home, not all were so fortunate. Tech firms unable to effectively retool their businesses in four primary categories either suffered huge losses or closed forever. Two years is a long time to learn any managerial lesson. Hopefully your tech company was well positioned to weather the storm. However, if you are on the brink of launching your first enterprise, there’s more to assembling a remote team than recruitment and salaries. Spend some time reviewing your business plan as it relates to the following four categories of software nonnegotiables you’ll need to thrive in today’s global economy. 1. Communication And Connectivity Your employees might well be scattered across several time zones. If poorly managed, teams working at the headquarters of your tech startup could easily find themselves waiting for team members in another country to wake up before a crucial development task can move forward. It doesn’t matter if all your people are housed in a single (preferably cruelty-free) cube farm or scattered across the planet. Communication snafus at any level cost money and waste time. Before bringing your remote people on board, ensure that their internet connection has something well above 95% uptime. Get them to sign off on one communication tool that you will use to evaluate their job performance. Yes, they may prefer Slack, but if your leadership has already mandated ClickUp or some other contact tool, make it apparent that compliance with your choice is nonnegotiable. It’s a make-or-break requirement. 2. Collaboration Tools Though they often get lumped together, there are some essential distinctions between effective communication, collaboration and project management. Where contact is primarily concerned with timely signaling and dispelling ambiguity, collaboration tools zero in on specific tasks assigned to individual team members working together. For example, anyone who has ever received a digital file from a colleague—only to discover that they don’t have a software license for the application used to create it—knows the value of effective collaboration. Assuming that your creative team needs Photoshop to do its job, not everyone they work with may need another costly license. Part of effective collaboration is adequate training in and adherence to company procedures. Using the example in the preceding paragraph, your creatives would need to understand from day one the importance of converting their PSD layered rough drafts to JPGs or PDFs before seeking feedback from colleagues. Similarly, your company may need to invest in file conversion software to interact with people outside your organization effectively. Many free solutions exist online (file conversion tools in particular), but you may also need to consider other options. One typical example that often rears its head as a company grows is the need for practical, limitless optical character recognition (OCR) solutions for scanning paper documents and capturing data. Windows 10 features native OCR functionality, and Google OCR might do the trick, but high-volume tasks might require something far more robust. 3. Project Management Depending on the size and complexity of your company, project management software needs can vary widely. However, even the smallest tech firm can fall into the trap of failing to see the forest for the trees. To keep your teams from inadvertently colliding, you’ll want to adopt a project management solution that can adapt quickly as conditions merit. Today, there are several software development services available for project management. You might find it overwhelming to pick the right one for your company. Keep these three considerations front and center as you sift through various offerings: • Ease of use for all your team members. If, for example, you are mixing creatives with programmers, you’ll want to look for a solution that is equally intuitive for left- and right-brain thinkers. It’s vital to keep in mind that a steep learning curve to adopt any new communication technology is a huge red flag. • Increased reliance on remote workers. The remote team trend will only increase over the next several years. Look for a project management solution that is cloud-based, secure and accessible to all, no matter the time of day. • Comprehensive resource tracking and alignment. Your tech company only has so much time, equipment and funding. Any project management tool should allow you to track all of your resources effectively and assign those costs to specific tasks. 4. Sales And Marketing Many tech leaders, seeking to recoup investment and beef up the bottom line, prioritize sales and marketing over other infrastructure software. Savvy CEOs will seek to reverse that dynamic. You’ll build a company that enjoys excellent word-of-mouth and zero-effort sales via referral. Once you’ve effectively addressed the first three software categories, it’s time to invest in customer relationship management (CRM). In our era, authenticity and relationship hold the keys to loyal customers who won’t easily be lured away by lower prices offered by unknown entities. Any CRM package worth its salt will help all of your people (emphasis on all) develop and maintain deeper connections with customers, vendors and remote employees.
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