Team Augmentation: Increasing Your Speed to Market

In 2021, Hay’s research found that 64% of employers believed the tech skills shortage would impact the effectiveness of their organisation or department. We increasingly hear the same concern from clients and prospective clients. They’re struggling to find the talent they need, and critical projects are being delayed. This blog discusses how Team Augmentation helps overcome these challenges by providing tech talent on-demand and improving speed to market.

Team Augmentation

Our team augmentation consultants have been injected into many businesses over the past 20 years. They have worked on various digital transformation projects, integrations, DevOps infrastructure and more. Our consultants become a part of our clients’ extended workforce, working with them on-site or remote to get important work done. What’s great about team augmentation is its flexibility to meet client needs. For example, we can provide specialists in different tech stacks for different lengths of time as we did for our client IPSI, or a team of consultants on a 12-month contract. Our ability to provide our clients with on-demand consultants who can get to work quickly is via our bench and active pipeline.

How does our bench increase speed to market?

Firstly, our bench provides our clients with consultants who ramp up faster than contractors and get the job done. The word bench can have negative connotations, so let me explain what we mean.

In sport, the bench is where players support the team and spectate, but they’re not playing. Our bench works a little differently. At 4mation, our bench consists of full-time consultants ready for their next challenge. They may be between contracts, coming back from leave or specialists we’ve hired preemptively that we know will bring value to our clients. Whilst on the bench, our consultants spend their time upskilling and preparing for their next role. This includes undertaking paid certifications or working with our delivery team on client projects.

On our bench at the moment, we have a variety of consultants. This includes consultants who have recently finished projects for our clients. Their skills include:

• React Native for mobile app development
• Fullstack Javascript Developer with Angular or React in the frontend
• Java Developer

If you need technical resources now, we have consultants ready to step in and accelerate your project.

How does our active pipeline increase speed to market?

Secondly, we provide our clients with consultants when they need them by having an active pipeline.

Our team is constantly building our pipeline with some of Australia’s best technical talent. Our pipeline consists of fully vetted consultants (assessed by senior, hands-on technical leaders — not recruiters) who are ready to join our team and start working on the next client project. Speaking about our active pipeline, Scott Wastell, one of our technical recruiters said:

“Our active pipeline consists of consultants engaged with our company. They are qualified, fully vetted (both culturally and technically) and ready to augment a new team. The strong relationships we have built with prospective consultants in advance means we can find the right person for our clients and help them reach project milestones faster.” — Scott Wastell

Emerging tech stacks and hiring challenges

We’re constantly engaging with our clients to better understand the emerging tech stacks they need and the hiring challenges they’re facing. This year, we are focusing on event-driven architecture and cloud-native serverless technologies. These technologies enable businesses to reliably scale and closely tie their infrastructure spending with their level of customer demand. By focusing on them early, we will be prepared to fulfil our clients’ project needs faster when they arise

As for hiring challenges, we’ve been helping our clients through their tech talent challenges this year. The high demand for tech talent in the job market has increased resignations and led to clients being short-staffed. We’ve helped our clients keep their projects on track by filling these gaps at short notice, providing new insight into their engineering teams, and giving them breathing room to focus on longer-term goals for their business.

Check out the video below with Scott Morris and Diluka Senarath to learn more about how team augmentation can add value to your tech roadmap.

Originally published at https://www.4mation.com.au on April 21, 2022.