Arvind Sarin

Geographically dispersed teams are increasingly common in the modern workplace — perhaps you’re based in your company’s New York headquarters and your team works out of offices in Denver and Charlotte or maybe you’re in San Francisco and manage telecommuters in LA and a group of developers in Minsk. How do you overcome the challenges of supervising employees in different locations and time zones? What steps should you take to build trust and open lines of communication? How should you establish… Show more

Geographically dispersed teams are increasingly common in the modern workplace — perhaps you’re based in your company’s New York headquarters and your team works out of offices in Denver and Charlotte or maybe you’re in San Francisco and manage telecommuters in LA and a group of developers in Minsk. How do you overcome the challenges of supervising employees in different locations and time zones? What steps should you take to build trust and open lines of communication? How should you establish routines? And how do you help remote workers feel part of a team?

Case Study #1: Unite employees around a common goal

Arvind Sarin, the co-founder and CEO of Copper Mobile, a mobile app development firm, ....headquarters in Dallas, Texas, and its office in Noida, India. The majority of the company’s clients are in North America. Because of the difference in time zones, there was some resentment between team members. “There was still a feeling of: ‘Oh, that team over there rolls out at 6pm while we’re here working late into the night,’” he explains.

To mitigate the building resentment and bring the team together, Arvind decided to be more open about the company’s overarching goals and financial targets. He took a new approach with a big project Copper Mobile was working on for an LA-based ... company. “In order to get everyone on the same page, I painted a picture of our strategy so that everyone — from developers in India to the leadership team here — would know what we’re doing,” he says.

His aim was to “lay it all out” for employees in both offices “so that everyone knew what to expect” and felt bonded by a common goal — to successfully execute the project. In a series of meetings...

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When making technology decisions for your company, a lot probably goes through your mind. How will it impact operations, what effect it will have on your customers, what it will mean for your internal team, how your bottom line will be impacted, etc. As mobility has become ever more crucial in most companies’ strategic plan, it has added yet another consideration every company must consider when weighing investment choices, strategic priorities, etc. And one of the hardest choices you’ll have… Show more

When making technology decisions for your company, a lot probably goes through your mind. How will it impact operations, what effect it will have on your customers, what it will mean for your internal team, how your bottom line will be impacted, etc. As mobility has become ever more crucial in most companies’ strategic plan, it has added yet another consideration every company must consider when weighing investment choices, strategic priorities, etc. And one of the hardest choices you’ll have to make is how you develop whatever mobile solution you have in mind.

For the longest time, there were really only two options when it came to mobile development — either you had (or hired) the resources to do it internally, or you hired a third-party company to build the solution for you. There are advantages to each. Specifically, you have more control over an internal team and can make changes more quickly because there’s no communication gap. That being said, if something isn’t performing correctly, you might not know with whom the problem lies — meaning you’re the one who has to dig into each issue and find out who messed up. With an external team, you have much less to worry about on a day-to-day basis, but if they mess something up at a big milestone, there might be a lot of work in store to fix it. On the positive side, though, you’re not the one who has to figure out who messed up where — it’s your mobile developers’ job to do that.

There are a host of reasons why a company might choose one model over the other. If you have the resources and commitment to mobile such that you can hire an entire team to do that for you, that’s fantastic. If you’re a smaller company and want to build an app or two but don’t see an entire mobile team in your future, hiring an external partner makes perfect sense. But, what if you’re somewhere in between the two?

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For the technically inclined, mobile app design might engender thoughts of architecture, speed or function. For the creatives among us, mobile app design might concern color palettes, branding elements or navigation flow. For the business minds, mobile app design might entail bottom line costs, new potential customers, better connections with existing ones and the possibility of improved savings or greater revenues. The fact is, mobile app design is all of these things. For an app to achieve… Show more

For the technically inclined, mobile app design might engender thoughts of architecture, speed or function. For the creatives among us, mobile app design might concern color palettes, branding elements or navigation flow. For the business minds, mobile app design might entail bottom line costs, new potential customers, better connections with existing ones and the possibility of improved savings or greater revenues. The fact is, mobile app design is all of these things. For an app to achieve peak success, it requires great aesthetic design, rock-solid technical design and exacting business planning. What many people might not realize, though, is that an app’s aesthetic design is more than just vanity — it can have a very real impact on the bottom line too. -

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To in-source or outsource? That is the question… or is it?

One of the questions we see in the enterprise app development field the most is whether or not a company should build an internal mobile staff or hire an onshore vs. offshore development partner. Like most choices, there are advantages and disadvantages to each option.

With an in-house team, you have the most control over the design and development process. Your developers are experts in your business from the beginning… Show more

To in-source or outsource? That is the question… or is it?

One of the questions we see in the enterprise app development field the most is whether or not a company should build an internal mobile staff or hire an onshore vs. offshore development partner. Like most choices, there are advantages and disadvantages to each option.

With an in-house team, you have the most control over the design and development process. Your developers are experts in your business from the beginning because you hired them, whereas it can take a third party firm some time to get onto the same level of expertise. On the flip side, it costs a lot of money and takes a long time to build a mobile team within your company. And, if you’re a small to medium-sized business, you probably don’t have the budget to build an entire mobile team.

If you choose to go with an external partner for your mobile strategy and development, you generally have to choose between a domestic or an offshore firm. Domestic firms usually excel in design and user experience, but can suffer in the technical proficiency department. Plus, their developers usually cost far more, so your budget immediately goes up even though the quality might be similar.

Offshore firms are great from a cost efficiency and technical prowess standpoint, but can often struggle with change requests and core functionality design if they don’t have an exact grasp on what you’re trying to do with your application. Plus, the time differential and language barrier can make it a hassle to work with them.

Hybrid firms are in the middle. They usually pair an onshore design and account management team with ....

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The largest problem most companies were concerned about within their mobile strategy — namely, the lack of one. 45 percent of all companies surveyed by the Enterprise Mobility Exchange identified “building a coordinated mobile strategy” as their number one concern when it comes to mobility. The next largest concern was building a mobile app — which many companies incorrectly assume is a “comprehensive mobile strategy” — and that didn’t even register 15 percent. So, by a ratio of three to one… Show more

The largest problem most companies were concerned about within their mobile strategy — namely, the lack of one. 45 percent of all companies surveyed by the Enterprise Mobility Exchange identified “building a coordinated mobile strategy” as their number one concern when it comes to mobility. The next largest concern was building a mobile app — which many companies incorrectly assume is a “comprehensive mobile strategy” — and that didn’t even register 15 percent. So, by a ratio of three to one, determining and executing a coordinated mobile strategy is what keeps CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, COOs and CEOs awake at night when it comes to mobility.

If you’re like the companies surveyed, you’re struggling to put together a coherent mobile strategy because you can’t keep pace with the staggering speed of advancement in mobile. It’d be great if we could give you one piece of advice of exactly where to begin but unfortunately, there are far too many variables at play to determine what YOUR first step should be. For some of you, you’ve already developed an app or two; for others, you haven’t even thought about your first move in mobile, much less started development. For different industries and different types of companies, this first move can vary immensely. However, for those of you that are closer to the beginning of your mobile journey, we can give you some direction that should be beneficial. For those of you that are a little farther along, stay tuned next week where we’ll get to some later steps in the process.

The first thing you must do to build a coordinated mobile strategy starts with the age-old question...

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