There was a time when it was easy to seek advice on technology investments. Just contact your in-house IT leader and obtain all the necessary information in no time.
But times are changing. COVID-19 has rendered businesses across almost every sector unable of functioning normally. So if you’re a startup or an agency for one, is there a better way to evaluate and streamline certain aspects of your software project?
Yes, with less investment of time and cost you can get better results from your remote IT consultants and focus more on your other important things.
In this blog, we will discuss a few tools and strategies that will help you managing remote teams in a better way.
The Right Tools & Strategies for collaborating with IT consulting firms
The selection of the right tools and strategies should be the foremost concern of every business as it can help them deliver the best strategy & technology consulting services to their clients. Being an entrepreneur, you have to spend a lot of time on the research in order to adjust to the expectations of new as well as existing clients. You may have to work in the night for late hours and managing all Excel and PowerPoint documents in the right manner. But the question is how an IT consultant company would do that?
The answer is here. In today’s market, you’re only as good as the tools you select. Regardless of how marketable, smart, and experienced you are, it is virtually impossible to thrive without aligning your IT consulting firm with the right resources that alleviate challenges and offer financial advantages too.
Moreover, communication tools play a very important role in the success of any top IT consulting firms. It provides the ability to communicate well with their clients and can pass on their valuable ideas which ultimately help them improve their business. Again, you require robust communication tools if you want to share your innovative ideas seamlessly.
Tools for a better it consulting experience:
1) UberConference
This tool helps in making free conference calls and screen sharing with a permanent URL. It is one of the best free voice and screen sharing tools used by top IT consulting firms. With this tool, you can hop on and can have a screen share with your respective clients in order to show them what they wanted to see even when you are not there to sit next to them.
The best thing about the free version of this tool is that you can have a permanent URL. You have a permanent URL that you can send to the person you meet with, or you can put it on an invitation for a permanent meeting and the assistants always know that you are going to use your Uber conference line and it will not work or change. Moreover, you do not have to send them a new one every time.
2) Slack
Asynchronous communication is excellent, but it is about managing your own energy and the communication expectations of your customers. This is used for asynchronous communication. Many IT consulting firms are using this tool for delivering the best IT consulting services to their clients. By using this, you can embed yourself with your client’s team which is a full product or full growth team but might not be having an SEO professional or a leading in-charge of organic traffic.
This is a good tip for all IT consultants and IT consulting companies that if you constantly communicate with your customers, solve those big problems and help them succeed, you will retain more customers. The results have yet to happen, but they are not what ultimately retain customers. Hence, you can use Slack to be involved in communication with the clients in real-time. You can also turn off notifications if you get constantly pinged each time.
3) Severa
It is another major communication tool for handling dedicated projects. However, Slack will help with basic project management, but it is a communication tool more than anything else. If you seriously want to manage projects in the most efficient way possible, you will need a specific solution, and Severa is one of the best. It will not only help you stay organized and meet deadlines, it will also make you look more professional to your customers. It is an essential addition to anyone’s IT consulting toolbox.
4) Calendly
This tool is good for scalable meeting scheduling. You have to pay for this tool as it costs $10 per month. With this tool, you can send a link to your client where they can grab time on your calendar to talk. Now, they become aware of meeting time with you and further schedule time to chat in the coming day. This tool saves your consulting time with needed communication and emails and also schedule calls to get the actual work done.
5) Due
It is a good tool for handling all the bookkeeping and accounting tasks automatically. It becomes sometimes difficult to run a company successfully while handling all the accounting and financing tasks on your own. In the initial stages, you may not be able to afford to outsource these responsibilities to an accountant. The obvious answer is the need for a resource that one has created in Due. This intuitive and reliable accounting system will help you avoid unnecessary headaches throughout the year and pay you faster online.
6) Zoom
This tool is useful in video conferencing. It is a super important tool if you are working with a remote IT consulting company or your remote clients as it allows you to have video calls. With this, you will get face-to-face time with your clients which is an amazing feature.
It is the best video conferencing tool used by startups these days. It is free up to a certain amount of time then you must pay later. In fact, you can continue with the Zoom accounts of your clients and you can use Zoom whenever you want.
Read Also: Benefits of Hiring IT Outsourcing Companies
7) Recurring meetings on Google Sheet
This is the last and important strategy that you can use for working with remote teams. This lets you have a weekly meeting set-up with each of your clients. You can manage this well if you maintain the same in the Google sheets with timing and other details mentioned on it.
This is a weekly one-on-one meeting with your clients. It can take 10 minutes or it can be 30 minutes depending on the weekly schedule, but it is guaranteed that each week you will talk with each of your clients and you will know what happens that week and which is the most important. Also, things are for you to be working.
However, the priorities can be changed throughout the week, especially when you are not there and you are not listening to internal conversations, so this keeps you abreast of the upcoming needs.
Related: TOP 10 IT CONSULTING COMPANIES TO SEEK FOR BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
Wrapping up
So we have seen the complete list of the top 7 tools and strategies which you need for remote IT consulting success. This would surely improve the overall productivity rate of your business. And obviously, if you ignore the above tools or strategies, then this will be a significant disadvantage to your business since all your competitors are using advanced tools and solutions like the ones listed above. So, have a look at these tools, let your in-house team learn how to use them while working remotely, so you could collaborate actively with IT consulting companies.
Now, if you are planning to hire an offshore software development team then why not have a talk with our experts?. ValueCoders, a leading Indian IT outsourcing company since 2004, is delivering offshore software development services for the last 13 years and have 450+ developers strong. Feel free to contact us!
