What to ask your agency about working with a remote team

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on working with a remote team, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Write things down, because hallway context does not exist. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Regular short calls beat rare long ones. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about working with a remote team before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Write things down, because hallway context does not exist — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.