Your dedicated development team works tirelessly to deliver a product or a service on time. At first, this can be a struggle, but eventually, that team will develop a workflow that makes everything possible. Soon, that team will be humming along like a well-oiled machine.
But then demand happens. Your product or service becomes hot, and everybody wants a piece of the action. When this befalls your development team, that well-oiled machine can start to come apart. Deadlines are missed, products aren’t as thoroughly tested, and things become unsettled and stressful.
When that happens, you might either hire more in-house talent or you could turn to external contractors to help shore up the process, like with Staff Augmentation services. After all, more minds and fingers at work on a project should equate to a more efficient and successful workflow, correct?
On paper, yes. However, the reality of such a situation is that it can be complicated to integrate those external contractors into your internal workflow. If you’re not careful, that attempted integration can wreak a special kind of havoc over your teams, which can lead to a break in that once-seamless workflow.
How do you avoid shortcomings? You follow a few important guidelines to make it all come together so that your internal and external teams function as one unit.
Let’s see how we can help you address those concerns.
1. Get Them Actively Involved
Right out of the gate, it’s important that you get those external contractors actively involved. That doesn’t mean you should just throw them directly into the mix and hope it all works out. That is a recipe for failure.
Instead, you should make sure those external contractors are active in their involvement with the process. One of the issues you might experience in the beginning is that your external and internal teams will feel very much like separate entities. This is where onboarding processes should kick in.
That might simply mean holding Zoom meetings so the external contractors can introduce themselves and start to feel as if they are important members of the whole. Anything you can do to avoid the separation between the teams will help a great deal to get (and keep) everyone on the same page.
And with external contractors feeling as if they are part of the team, they’ll be more inclined to work harder and integrate more seamlessly. Explain how the contractors’ expertise fits your company’s needs and challenges, and allow concerns to be resolved in the initial phase.
2. Make Sure Roles Are Clearly Defined
At the same time, you must ensure that all roles are clearly defined. That doesn’t mean your internal developers should know they are internal and the external developers aren’t part of the team.
Take the time to define everyone’s roles. Instead of there being internal and external developers, you should lay the groundwork for all developers to be treated equally. If, for instance, you are working with BairesDev’s outsourced software development teams, you might have a few key roles to pay attention to other than software developers. Scrum Masters, Project Managers, and Technical Leaders are there to support your project and advise when it comes to best practices.
If you only have individual experts as contractors, don’t separate each team into, for example, “internal backend devs” and “external backend devs.” Instead, any external contractors who are a part of the backend development process are simply labeled “backend developers.” With those roles clearly defined as such, you’ll find the external contractors will more easily integrate with the workflow, creating a seamless process that doesn’t cause stress or breakdowns in the process.
3. Set Clear Priorities
You’ve probably become very adept at setting priorities for your internal developers. Those priorities most likely all center around deliverable deadlines. If that’s the case, you should already be one step ahead of the process and can integrate those external contractors into your already established priorities.
If not, it’s time you (and your management team) get together to set clear priorities for both internal and external teams. That doesn’t mean those priorities should vastly differ, but there will probably be some variation in priorities. For example, your external contractors will have to prioritize their scheduling. If they are not full-time in-house employees, they might have more than one contract gig. If that’s the case, you’ll have to work with those contractors to ensure your product gets a certain level of priority during part of the day. With BairesDev’s Staff Augmentation services, you don’t have to worry about having someone’s part-time attention, as they work full-time on your projects, just like one more player on your team.
Priorities should be defined by your Product Owner, and they should be in synch with the assessment of a Business Analyst or Project Manager. This prioritization should be reflected in your Backlog and task breakdown. Having clear priorities and a solid backlog should prevent Scope Creep, and it should keep Sprints healthy and milestones on track.
4. Employ Tools That Make It Easy for Them to Communicate
Because those contractors are external to the company, it is imperative that you use the necessary tools to keep the flow of communication happening. Part of this means adding those external contractors to team collaboration tools.
Say, for example, you use Slack. You probably have a few different workspaces created (such as for frontend, backend, database, and UX). You might be tempted to create a workspace for internal and external developers, but that would be a mistake. You need those teams to collaborate seamlessly, which means both internal and external developers need to be in the same workspaces together. On top of that, if you separate teams by internal and external, you’ll inadvertently place a wedge between them, which will lead to inefficiencies or (worse) an environment that is prone to attrition.
Tools and platforms are key to getting everyone working under favorable circumstances. Make sure to grant access and provide credentials for your external team members right at the beginning of the project. You must also address any training or guidance they might need for a great kick-off.
5. Don’t Ignore Their Processes
Those external contractors will come into the mix, already having their own processes they’ve developed over time. Although some pieces of their workflow (such as their tools of choice) might not perfectly integrate with your team’s processes, you’d be remiss not to at least allow their input or learn how they work.
By giving credence to the workflow of the external consultant’s process, you might learn something new that can be integrated into your company workflow. One or more of those external consultants might use a tool you’ve never heard of or might have developed a process that is far more efficient than what you’re already using.
After all, those external contractors have probably worked with other businesses and could have walked away learning something that could seriously improve your process. BairesDev is always looking to improve development processes and talent management, so you can imagine the volume of best practices that back our professionals, whether they are related to agile methodologies or technology expertise.
6. Learn How to Best Evaluate Results
This can be tricky to navigate. First, results may differ between internal and external teams. Your internal teams might be more efficient at first (while the external contractors get up to speed). You don’t want to evaluate the results of your internal and external developers differently, as that might cause a rift between the two. In the end, this will have to tie directly into priorities, so you can more fairly evaluate the results in such a way that everyone feels as if their contributions count and their results are on equal footing.
In case you have added a team of outsourced professionals to your company, the outsourcing partner might also have evaluating tools in place to assess individual performance, recommend approaches, or directly replace an underperforming element to meet your project’s needs. BairesDev does this in Staff Augmentation and Dedicated Teams services. We respond quickly to periodical results and offer mentorship to those professionals who need it.
7. Break Your Teams from Their Silos
This goes along with communication. If your teams wind up in silos, collaboration becomes challenging. This can be especially difficult if the silos are further broken into internal and external, such that you have internal frontend developers vs. external frontend developers, neither of which communicate and collaborate well with the other teams.
Once your teams wind up in silos, it can be very challenging to break them free. That leads to the breakdown of collaboration, which in consequence, derives in failed deadlines (or worse).
Break those teams out of their silos by continually stressing the importance of communication and collaboration. You might even move teams around after a project is complete. Either way you go, it’s very important you prevent those teams from isolating themselves from one another.
Conclusion
The single most important thing you can do as a software development company is to ensure your external contractors feel like they are part of the team. They may not have an office within your business, and they may not have benefits or stocks, but they are an important part of the workflow you hired to ensure things get done in a timely fashion.
Make sure those contractors have all the context, tools, and information they need to integrate seamlessly with your workflow. As they will become an extension of your team, you want to be thorough in vetting your outsourcing partner. Once you’ve chosen the best vendor to work with, apply these seven recommendations that will set your project up for success.
