I once worked on a gig where I needed to manage a team of contract developers overseas.

Some of the stuff they were producing was pretty horrendous (a common symptom of remote contract coders - they don't really care a lot for your code, they just want to get done fast).

To manage the project, I found myself producing UML diagrams and handing it to them to code. It was very successful - it didn't take me that long to write a program in UML, much faster than in Java, and it was something the contractors could follow and be measured against.

One caveat - they did at times want to become creative and deviate from my models, however in those cases they were actually correct, and over all the UML improved the quality of the final product