Establishing an agile process, structured project management, and beginning operations monitoring are an entity’s main objectives.
The difficulty of scaling their teams affects many startups and businesses, especially startups. For the proper management of projects and driving in the right directions, coordination between teams becomes essential.
To start a project, you need a well-qualified team of developers. The challenge that most companies face in scaling their teams is hiring resources. The dilemma is, how and where to hire?
We have addressed this challenge and given you the complete guidelines for you to hire and scale a team. If you are looking for information on where to hire while keeping the budget and quality scale balanced, you are at the right place for your answers.
Let’s understand the need to scale a team and the solutions
Development teams are generally scaled to support aggressive business growth, add new and lacking skills, increase in-house or outsourced product development capacity, and so much more.
To deploy a development team on a project, startups and enterprises first need to measure their time and resources.
The developer’s skills and experience are required to tend to change. They depend on the scope and extent of the project.
The way your team is set up will also affect how it performs. When you are deciding on a budget for team compensation and other expenses, you need to consider the following factors:
- Location of your business
- Your line of work
- Type of work (full-time, part-time, contract)
- Employees’ requirements and their skills
Moreover, the time you have available for the project and the resources (i.e., money and other equipment) you have to spend on it will help the enterprises determine how long the project will take.
In this blog, you will get to know the essentials of scaling a development team.
Building An Efficient Project Roadmap
The first step towards establishing a project is to scale a roadmap for the project;
Step 1- Project features:
Understanding the client’s goal, identifying the project features like Key functionalities of the app, potential app users, the audience who is going to use the app, and other objectives. Compare your project with existing applications, if any. Then comes what the audience expects or demands out of the project you are working on. Moving to the next step
Step 2- Time Mapping:
The time you need to complete the project or the time you have been given to complete the project should be well utilized. The amount of work you have to do on the project should be divided into specific time periods of the project lifecycle. For example, designing the app- for 2 weeks, full development- for 2 months, user testing for 3 weeks, and deployment for 1 week.
Step 3- Framework with the steps and directions:
Next, you have to provide a framework for the processes, tasks, and tools used to take a project from start to finish. It contains all of the essential elements needed for organizing, supervising, and managing projects. This is the cycle a project goes through from beginning to end.
Step 4- Type of staff requirement:
Since you have different aspects in the development of the product, you will need to find the resources (developers) for each aspect and also need to make sure they are proficient in their field.
Assess the Necessary Resources for Your Project.
A product goes through different stages of development, design, and testing before coming to implementation. Each stage has its own value and requires expertise for the best outcomes. After the development, you need to invest your effort in maintenance and enhancement. Let’s see how to manage this;
Hiring the necessary resources
The above-mentioned roles and responsibilities for development demand skillful and experienced team members. Most of the leading companies tend to hire developers in India. You need to give it some thought before hiring. A wise person would always consider the deadlines, quality, and budget before hiring the necessary resources.
Now the question arises of the fulfillment of resources. Below are a few options for how you can hire or deploy a team for your project;
1. Inhouse Team
In-house recruitment always comes with the leverage of accessing the progress anytime you want. In-house refers to an activity or operation conducted within a company instead of relying on outside providers. One can use this option to build their core team and culture with full-time employees.
- Objective: To hire a core team who can access and control the progress of the project from within the house.
- Advantage: Companies have greater control over the direction and management of work by their in-house employees.
- Challenges: expensive, takes a long time in the recruitment process, and the resources drop out in between the project’s development.
2. Outsource
Outsourcing means bringing services from an outside vendor into one’s own organization. You can hire on-demand developers to completely handle the development work while your in-house team focuses on more creative product-related tasks.
- Objective: You can outsource some parts of the project. Part of that can be done separately.
- Advantage: It is cost-effective, Time saving, you can have a 3rd party views and ideas for your projects, flexibility, and a balance between developing skills and rates.
- Challenges: one challenge could be communication, and the other is losing control of progress.
3. Contractual hiring
It is immediate and temporary hiring. A contract position is where a developer is hired to complete a specific job over a predetermined period of time and for a set amount of money.
- Objective: Downsize the inhouse team and hire on a contract basis for the short time period
- Advantages: staffing flexibility, no long-term relationships with staff, saving money, security of a written agreement.
- Challenges: So far, the only challenge is communication.
In order to ensure that the project is finished on time, within scope, and on budget, it is necessary to onboard the appropriate personnel and resources. For development projects, hire mobile app developers India.
Keys to Scaling a Development Team
1. Onboarding process
During the onboarding phase of the team, project managers frequently introduce new procedures and tools. Additionally, teams frequently grow and shrink as new projects are undertaken, depending on the resources required to complete them. Project managers are required to somehow introduce their team to the project.
Each new resource has to understand the following points
Defined process for the project.
- The engineering process
- Understanding the development process
- Different types of environments like development models, production, staging of the project, and more.
- Project duration
Go through the design/architectural documents for the product
- Onboarding documents: Project briefs, scopes, and notes
- Giving the brief about the concept and expected result
- Information about the project methodology
- An overview of documents, terms, and conditions
Roles and responsibilities of different team members.
- Introduction to the management
- Defined roles and responsibilities of the team members.
Communication tools & project management tools
- Essential tools for project communication.
- Weekly status report
- Discussion and project boards
2. Ground rules of Communication
Effective open communication is essential for managing the development of large projects, especially when working with allocated developers. You can evaluate your current channels of communication and create a plan that works for both on-site and remote employees.
Make sure the contractor gives the developers the necessary tools and software if you outsource any work. A monthly fee per user per device is frequently the best way to pay for services.
Gather team members who work locally and remotely. You might also need to change the working hours of some employees and set alerts to respond to emergencies that occur in different time zones.
3. Monitor Progress
Project tracking entails determining the rate of progress in real-time, in terms of time and money, as well as producing a successful outcome.
Monitoring related resources that have been used at any given time and keeping track of completed tasks and milestones are also components of the project control process.
Daily Scrum:
The scrum team monitors its sprint progress during daily scrum meetings. It is designed for small teams that work in short time frames known as “sprints,” which are typically just two weeks long and last no longer than 30 days.
The daily scrum is all about the discussion of what you did yesterday. What are you going to do today?
It might help all units communicate and exchange the correct information. This team typically includes the members from each team chosen to address user interface design, architecture, integration testing, and deployment. The daily scrum also helps to identify, analyze, and resolve coordination issues and risks.
When it comes to task management, use shorter sprints to enable quicker responses, keep your backlog full, and designate a responsible person for each task. Jira is a fantastic resource for this.
Make sure the developers can access and search through feedback and customer support questions to aid communication between the tech and customer-facing teams. For instance, every team member can find information about previous issues and problems mentioned by customer support with the help of Slack’s search feature.
The daily scrum meeting is an opportunity for the project manager to discuss any process that falls under his or her purview, including the project team, scope statements, risk registers, and others.
4. Project Governance
The outsourced account manager, team leaders, and the project manager should all attend regular meetings to discuss the project’s governance.
The distribution and assignment of decision rights and accountability between the project team and executives is a crucial component of project governance.
There are a few ground rules to be set for effective governance.
Defined Structure for Governance
- Regular meetings on a fortnightly or weekly basis.
- Participation of each team member in the meeting
- Discussions and decisions should be made in the presence of team members.
- Taking feedback from the project or account manager.
- Follow the reporting hierarchy
- Risk management and control
- Accountability for decision-making
- Tools for managing the project
Following the above-mentioned facts provides us with early feedback on where things were not going in the right direction. This way, we can fix things on time for the smooth implementation of the final project.
Concluding Notes
After proper analysis, we at Quytech suggest and support contractual hiring for project management. It is suggested by the top IT staff augmentation companies that there are many benefits of using temporary contracts to hire employees rather than hiring an in-house employee for the long term.
It is known that in the initial stage, a large development team is hired to work efficiently, and it’s possible that the total amount of work adequately requires a huge team to cover, but with time the workload decreases, and so a huge team is not required anymore. You can avoid unnecessary maintenance of staff.
In this complete stage, you can prefer contractual hiring for 25 to 30 percent of team members. Like, if you need 10 people on the team, then hire 3 members on a contractual basis.
Quytech can assist you if you are currently looking for a contract hire but are short on time or resources. In a variety of divisions and industries, we specialize in locating leading skilled developers on contract-to-hire for temporary, and full-time positions.
