How It Works: Teams As A Service
When you’re scaling a software company, it can be a challenge to meet growing customer expectations and deliver shippable code. One moment you’re starting out as an entrepreneur with a small team, and the next moment you’re faced with the need to recruit. And fast.
The truth is, when you’re in a fast-paced competitive market such as developing software as a service (SaaS), investing time and money in making, training, and retaining additional hires – the right hires at that – can be a drain on finance and resources. Ultimately, it impacts the time to market of your next iteration or new product.
Teams as a service offer you everything you’re looking for in an in-house development team, without taking up desk space, weighing down your costs, or draining your time.
Recruitment Challenges For SaaS
As the market for SaaS continues to grow, so do the barriers for outcompeting rivals. Recruitment can be a major hurdle for a number of reasons.
Firstly, there’s the war on talent, so getting the right candidates through the door can be a real challenge. You need to find people with the right skills and experience, and even then you still need to provide training to ensure the quality of their output.
Then there’s retention and career development to consider. It can get complicated very quickly – providing the right opportunities to encourage employees to stay and grow in your organization. At the same time, you have to ensure they’re able to work collaboratively – they might need coaching in soft skills alongside hard skills. That takes time.
Thirdly, when you take on employees, you need to ensure that the opportunities are there for them long term. Sometimes there’s a need to scale down as well as up. Being an employer reduces your flexibility and could end up being costly if you need to downsize your operation.
It goes without saying that there’s a lot to consider.
Enter Teams As A Service
That’s when a software development team as a service comes in. Rather than making additional costly hires, or looking to an agency to deliver ‘software developers’, choosing a software team as a service gives you access to a much broader talent pool.
This means the search can be narrowed down more precisely to individuals with skills and expertise matched to your specific needs. In essence, you’re contracting out your HR functionality to a specialist in software development recruitment, one which can draw from their talent pool, boot camps, and headhunting to ensure recruits are ready-trained and ready to code!
With freelancers, you get individuals who have the requisite job titles, but who are not necessarily a good fit for your organization. You’re also bringing in individuals as opposed to a team. Of course, that team may only consist of one developer to begin with, but further down the line you may need to scale.
With a team as a service, you get more than just an extra person with the right job title. The groundwork is done for you, so that you get the right people – not just a resource. Deployed by experts in integration, you can trust that the development team will have an Agile mindset, using proven methodologies that will enable seamless integration with your organization, whether they’re your primary technical team or working alongside your in-house developers.
An effective software development team as a service should plug in to your company and cut recruitment and training costs. And with a solution from Proshore, you’re buying in proven expertise for putting together teams as a service, teams that will understand your challenges and help you overcome them.
Understanding Your Challenges
Remote teams are trending, creating a growing global market for talent. If you’re bringing outside teams into your organization, getting it right relies on bringing on board tried and tested developers who are not just doing a job, but invested in your success.
The biggest value a team as a service can provide is a strategic understanding of your goals in relation to the work to be done. That’s not an automatic given when you take on a staffing agency to add capacity. With Proshore, we understand our developers and their needs in order to provide exceptional productivity and quality without being micromanaged.
Scaling Up And Down
Being an employer gives you less scope to scale as every new hire requires a recruitment process, followed by training, and onboarding. Should you need to scale down, it becomes more complicated to reduce employee numbers.
And if you find the right candidate, and they later leave, you then have to run the entire process again. This can be particularly problematic in software development, where losing capacity impacts how much work can be done within a sprint cycle.
Bringing in consultants can be expensive and whilst it might provide obvious short term benefits, it may not add the value you’re looking for in the long term. On the other hand, teams as a service gives you the flexibility to scale up and down as needed, so your capacity is more closely aligned with your development needs. As you only pay for what you require, it can help reduce your development costs. For example, you might begin with one developer and then require the services of a small managed team. Further down the line, if you need to scale back, it can be done without complicated and time-consuming HR work. Proshore works with you, taking a consultative approach as part of the right personnel provision for your development needs.
What Success Looks Like
Success is different for every customer. In essence, most enterprises know they need to add capacity, but they might not necessarily be clear on where and why it is most needed. Proshore can help your organization drill down to what really matters and identify the important work to be done. Teams as a service helps your enterprise overcome the scarcity of talent, help you reduce your time to market by providing a self-managed team that’s practised in Agile ways of working, and most importantly ready-to-go from the get go.
All of these advantages help you cut costs. After all, there’s no need to spend time and money on recruitment, and no need to manage operations when you hire a self-managed team. You also gain a competitive advantage because our teams are experienced and talented and matched to specific needs. Not only that, we know what good integration looks like because it’s what our business is built on.
Interested to learn how teams as a service from Proshore could work for you? Find out how we helped to add developer capacity for customer services solution provider Pluscloud.
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