Like any other trendy notion, digital services with distributed teams started to get surrounded by myths. Today, MWDN decided to play MythBusters and check out the legends and illusions about working with distributed teams from the point of view of a customer and an IT vendor.The definition of distributed teams
Judging by the way the phrase “distributed teams” is used even in professional circles, it may seem that the concept is exceptionally vague. It is used as yet another synonym for a remote team. However, even though these notions are similar, they are not exactly the same.Unlike a remote team of in-house employees, whose members, as a rule, have the opportunity to meet at least periodically, as they are located within the same city or country and have some kind of regional office, members of a distributed team often live in different countries and often – time zones.Busted myths about outsourcing digital services to distributed teams
Due to the benefits of hiring a distributed team, customers usually opt for this option when they require digital services or want to transform their businesses digitally. To keep you fully informed about this new trendy opportunity, we searched for misconceptions and misunderstandings that customers and IT vendors have. You should stop believing these top eight myths about working with distributed teams.1. Collaboration equals collocation 
Physically being in the same space to work together used to be the ultimate way to maintain the high efficiency of all your employees. However, two years of forced experiment during the Covid pandemic has demonstrated that it is not the case. Moreover, the International Labor Organization claims that the hourly productivity of people through multiple industries and various countries almost doubled in 2020 compared to the previous 2005-2019 years. 
Image source: International Labor Organization modeled estimates, ILOSTAT
Which just confirms that collaboration doesn’t equal collocation and that your employees can work as a team and stay productive even if they don’t spend 40 hours a week together, sitting in the same room.2. The partnership is the same as the vendor-customer relations
We often misuse the word partner by calling all our contractors, vendors, distributors, suppliers, and customers our partners. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. You’re not a partner to a grocery store where you do shopping. In the same way, you can’t call an IT vendor with a fixed-bid or request-for-quote business model your partner. Partners care about the further success of each other and see each other as strategic allies. They often sign a partnership charter or a “soft” contract to stay flexible and be able to react to any changes in each other’s business needs as fast as possible. Apart from that, having a caring business partner is a priceless investment in the future.3. A cross-functional team equals cross-functional engineers
Cross-functionality is a necessity for a project-oriented agile team. However, this doesn’t mean that all of your employees have to be cross-functional. What you need are the representatives of all departments that might be involved in the project. For example, to deploy a website you might need these specialists: - Front-end developer
- QA engineer
- UI designer
- Marketing specialist
- SEO copywriter
- Representative of the customer
4. Outsourcing digital services to distributed teams help customers achieve huge cost reduction
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Moreover, the absence of cost reduction is one of the key disappointments among new customers who believed that organizing distributed teams is as “affordable” as outsourcing digital services to third parties. There is a reason why a distributed team often results in direct labor costs equal to those of the in-house team. As a rule, you opt for offshore contractors when you’re looking for a particularly skilled specialist, and the higher the level of an expert is, the less is the chance that they will agree on a low salary.There might be a cost reduction but it is usually explained by the fact that you don’t need to pay the office rent in different parts of the world as most members of your distributed team will work remotely from home offices.5. Tracking the time of your distributed team is the only way to get value for the money you pay
Distributed teams and remote specialists usually do hourly billing. For example, if you have a full-time remote developer, you pay them weekly for 40 hours of their work. Some customers decide that the only way to control that they get the value for the money they pay is by asking their developers to download time-tracking software. This might be an option for IT vendors, but in most cases, project managers and technical team leads must explain to their customers that value for money does not equal 40 hours of work! Developers can mull over some intricate tasks for hours to write necessary lines code in a matter of minutes. Others can have some pre-written code they created for other projects long ago and now use it to solve a customer’s problem. And even though it wouldn’t take them a lot of time at the moment, there were days when they worked hard on a particular solution.
As with any kind of collaboration, to make all parts benefit from a distributed team model, there should be professional management, high motivation, due diligence of remote employees, and mutual trust.6. Working with multinational distributed teams has more cons than outsourcing digital and other services
There are certainly some challenges to managing geographically distributed teams. Among the most obvious ones is the necessity to organize efficient communication that would be comfortable for all members of the team. Considering that team members might live in different time zones and have little to no working hours overlap, even the organization of Agile ceremonies like stand-ups and retrospectives might turn out to be challenging. Provided that you can’t find tech talent in your city (or country) and you decide which business model to choose – a distributed team or outsourcing, let’s compare their challenges and pitfalls. | Healthcare | Fintech | Cybersecurity | Telecommunication |
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| Our expertise includes document management, medical billing, medical coding, and the creation of invasive tools for the Internet of Medical Things. One of our favorite clients in this domain is an Israeli platform NICaS. | We’ve worked with chargeback projects, companies that helped their clients pay taxes, and platforms focused on online payments. Among our financial clients are California-based NTG and VatBox. | Our experts know how to guarantee the safety of personal and bank details of your clients as well as how to organize safe remote access of your employees to your cloud-based platforms. Twingate is a security-related company whom we helped with software development. | We’ve worked with telecommunication leaders and assisted our partners with help-desk platforms for their employees and clients. We’ve worked with Bezeq for more than 18 months and still consider this project’s success one of the most outstanding achievements of our team. |
| Engineering | Transportation | Staff apps | Social media |
| All industries go digital and demand fresh software solutions, including companies that produce engineering constructions. During our almost 8-year-long cooperation with IRoofing, we helped our partner with AI solutions so that its app could create 3D models of future roofs. | We created apps for both premium-class limo booking companies and businesses that deliver food from restaurants to the client’s doors. Clients who helped us smarten up our knowledge of transportation and logistics: Gett taxi booking and delivery app Simple Order. | Creating B2B and B2C applications, we especially value our expertise in developing platforms for companies and their employees. During five years with Better Chains, our team managed to create a comprehensive and convenient app for both staff and managers of our client. | For Smupp social network, we were making a new 100% safe media where users could communicate anonymously and were guaranteed the utmost protection of their personal data. |
