Staff augmentation — selecting a partner and working well together
Tags: Staff Augmentation, Mobile App Development, Web Development, Design

Are you looking for extra resources to bring your project to life? Need development support while you’re backfilling roles in your team? Looking for an expert in a particular language or development field? Here’s where staff augmentation can be highly effective, but it’s important to ensure that you’re going about it the right way.

Selecting the right software agency

There are a number of things to take into account when selecting the right staff augmentation partner for your company.

Assessing your needs

It seems obvious, but at the beginning, the main question to ask yourself is — ‘what does your company actually need?’ Digital projects come in a whole range of varieties, and when planning, it’s important to be as specific as possible, while bearing in mind that priorities and scope can change. Consider addressing as many of the following as possible in your original brief:

Outline of project

Platforms — iOS, Android, Cross-platform?

Initial planned budget

Target audience

Stage of creation — i.e. an MVP, a new element or an iteration of an existing project, something else?

Languages — are you already working in a given development language? Do you have a specific language in mind that you would like to use?

What are your company’s current resources? In light of the above, what existing resources are you looking to allocate to your project? What outstanding resources do you think you are still likely to need?

Finally, do you need to feel you need to set up a temporary software division for this project, or might you actually need more permanent staff?

2. Selecting your partner — experience

Once you’ve made a shortlist of potential partners (- we would recommend having five that you will thoroughly check), it is worth beginning by evaluating their portfolio. It’s important to pay close attention to both the types of projects undertaken, and the types of clients, looking for some similarities with your own work. Read LinkedIn articles, Clutch and Behance reviews, Glassdoor feedback and any other platforms that are relevant to the project that you’re undertaking.

You’re looking for a partner that you can rely on, so it’s important to do as much research as possible. If you have the contact details of a prospective agency’s past clients, do reach out to them directly if you think it could be useful.

3. Selecting your partner — technical expertise

Equally important as past experience, is technical expertise. Look back on the brief that you created above, and check whether the agencies on your shortlist have the exact technical expertise that you’re looking for. If a particular development language is important to you, now is the time to check that your prospective partners are proficient in using it. It’s worth also asking questions about the other tools and communication platforms that each of the prospective agencies uses.

4. Selecting your partner — cultural fit

Ensuring that your prospective partner is the right cultural fit, is also a very important element of the selection process. Get to know each of your prospective partners in as much detail as possible. Here are some important things to take into consideration:

Is there a language barrier?

How will any potential difference in time zones affect your work?

What sort of communication tools and platforms do they use?

Do they provide regular updates?

4. Getting your project off to a good start — The on-boarding process

Once you have selected your staff augmentation partner, and they have agreed to work with you on your project, it is paramount that they are brought up to speed with work in an efficient manner. They need to have a full understanding of product, processes, tools and communication. It may be useful to appoint a Facilitator, who can be either somebody in your company, or in the partner agency — they can organize the onboarding process and ensure that everyone is on the same page. The process usually involves:

a kick-off meeting,

a scoping session,

knowledge transfer,

tools and process configuration,

setting cooperation standards in the project ,

implementing relevant elements of Scrum framework,

preparing documentation,

creating the definition of ‘done’ and confirming quality constrictions.

How we manage staff augmentation at 10Clouds

At 10Clouds, when we provide a full, dedicated team as part of staff augmentation, we assume to be using Scrum to manage development work.

Scrum gives us principles and practices that allow optimal performance and cooperation between all parties involved in any project. These include:

Delivering working, potentially releasable pieces of software often, and performing frequent inspections

and performing frequent inspections Adapting to changing requirements , to develop user or business needs, as well as improving the way we work, every sprint

, to develop user or business needs, as well as improving the way we work, every sprint Transparency in terms of collaboration , communication, understanding of the scope and mission behind the project

, communication, understanding of the scope and mission behind the project Focus on quality, in terms of continuously improving the development process within Scrum teams, as well as adopting company-wide best practises such as standard code reviews, unit tests, integration tests, Continuous Deployment/Continuous Delivery practices etc.

To manage work on a cross-team level we may adopt one of below approaches depending on your needs and the nature of your organization:

We tailor the communication approach, reporting and backlog management to standards We build a clear team structure with a small integration part which consists of Tech Lead, Scrum Master, QA specialist and Proxy Product Owner (if needed) to provide consistency. In case of component teams within the same project or feature teams within the same programme, we make sure that teams share a Tech Lead, Scrum Master, Proxy Product Owner or QA specialist. This ensures better communication and enables us to easily track dependencies between teams.

But what are the differences between the Staff Augmentation and a Managed Project?

If you would like to see in a nutshell how these processes vary, we have described them below, based on our experience of working in both:

Staff Augmentation

Scope and backlog management solely on client side

Team and agile process management solely on the client side. The client is responsible for utilising the developers’ time effectively;

10Clouds provides limited technical assistance for the team which includes setting up channels/tools and organising meeting rooms

Budget and timeline management is solely on the client side

Managed Project

Scope and backlog management are joint responsibilities for 10C Agile and 10C.

Prioritized Scope project types, with our 10Clouds Scrum Master providing support for the Product Owner on the client side.

For a fixed project type this responsibility is solely on 10Clouds’ side. In this case scope and backlog management is limited by constraints of the contract.

Project process is managed on 10Clouds’ side, with the client cooperating to ensure efficient work progress.

In general the project team is managed by 10Clouds with the client ensuring required collaboration with any resources on their side required for achieving project goals.

For 10C Agile and 10C Prioritized Scope project types, the budget and timeline management are a joint responsibility while 10Clouds constantly monitors those project parameters.

For fixed projects, the budget and timeline is managed by 10Clouds to ensure fulfilment of the contract.

A staff augmentation project in action

Example client: Emergent Tech (USA)

About the client: Emergent is a fintech company working on creating a gold-backed stable coin and a verified supply chain for trusted gold. The company sees an opportunity to elevate global commerce in emerging markets and is using cutting edge technology to solve these problems. Emergent has partnered with Trust Stamp for identity solutions and introduced the Responsible Gold™ Standard. In 2019, it cleared a number of regulatory approvals and introduced the G-Coin™ for both enterprise and retail.

Overview of the project: 10Clouds helped Emergent with extending it’s blockchain and mobile teams and worked on core elements of it’s wallet application.

Augmented team setup: 10Clouds provided a team of 6–9 people consisting of Python, ReactNative, ReactJS developers as well as QA and DevOps. Our team augmented existing development teams and collaborated closely with Product Owners and UX/UI designers on the client side. Apart from development work we were tasked with the organization of remote work and inter-team communication to ensure a seamless delivery of results.

Our challenge: The teams were distributed across the globe, with developers working in San Francisco, Warsaw and Hong Kong which provided a slight initial communication challenge. Moreover, complexity of the required solution architecture greatly limited the option for development teams in different timezones to work independently.

How we took it on: We used a range of tools and processes to obtain as seamless a collaboration and workflow as possible despite dependencies between work of teams in different timezones. Meanwhile we continuously worked on reducing the number of such dependencies. We dedicated as much time as possible during the overlap work hours of different time zones to investigate and solve encountered problems and share knowledge about recent changes and plans.

We used asynchronous daily status updates on Slack for all team members as well as a number of notifications for changes that might affect other team members (i.e. environment variables) to keep everyone in the loop. We held weekly backlog grooming and defect triaging meetings to make sure that a backlog of work was sufficiently refined and prioritized. We also held short team huddle meetings a few times a week to sync on current priorities and challenges.

Conclusion

Staff augmentation can save you money, give you more control and enable your business to scale faster. But the key is devoting some initial time and effort into ensuring that you select the right partner. Then, make sure that you have your onboarding process all sorted out so that your augmented team can get up to speed quickly.

We hope you find the above guidance on staff augmentation useful. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you would like to find out more.

Looking to work on a new digital a project? We can help. Just contact our friendly team on hello@10clouds.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.