How to Build a High-Functioning, Scalable Tech Team

Today it’s obvious companies operating in the tech sector must have highly developed tech expertise. This is something that goes without saying(but I just said it). However, this is not the only and not the foremost factor of success. Soft skills, including effective teamwork, becomes one of the key factors of success. How is it possible to organize a professional and efficient team that will deliver high-quality results? Read the article to find out the answers from the NIX specialist with 25 years of expertise in working with clients, team building, and delivering more than satisfactory results.

What is a high-performing team?

A good team is more than just a collection of professional individuals — the characteristics of the group as a whole is more than a combination of personal features of each team member. The activity of a high-performing team where each member is in the right place creates the features which none of them possesses as an individual.

According to numerous research studies, such as the one by Harvard Business Review, a high-performing team with engaged employees result in the boost of the business’ general productivity, lower turnover, and overall revenue growth.

Putting aside tech competencies a high-functioning team has many other strengths:

• Effective Work

Working effectively means reaching assigned goals within a given timeframe. This result can be reached only when each person in the team understands what the final and intermediate goals are and knows how to reach them as an individual specialist and as a team member. A shared vision of all processes is an important factor of this understanding.

• Shared Vision

A motivated team works together towards a common objective while being focused on delivering the best business results and solutions. To do so they should have a shared vision of their objective as a tech team, and what is equally important, a shared vision of the client’s business objectives, which their tech solution is designed to serve. The role of experienced team management (project manager, team lead, etc.) in this regard is to make sure that the whole team is on the same track. An open communication process can help get a shared vision and solve many problems that might occur.

• Open Communication

An open channel of communication always exists between the members and their leader in a high-performing team. It creates an environment of constructive criticism and feedback. No member of the team should be afraid to ask questions and express an opinion no matter how positive or negative it is. Even a minor comment can help find the best solution. It’s so important that the leadership makes sure that every person in the team is in an equal position to voice their opinion.

• Clear Roles Model

Many questions and problems can be avoided if each person in the team knows his area of responsibility and the scope of tasks he is expected to perform. In a well-balanced team, each question, such as “who makes a final decision?” and “who does a specific task?” does not appear. If the leadership can correctly instruct each team member what his role is, many problems do not appear at all.

• Mutual Respect

No matter what position on the team each person occupies, there should never appear disrespectful treatment toward one another. Here again, wise leadership, open communication, and a common understanding of the mutual goal can help. It is important that each person understands that no matter how minor his contribution is, he is still a significant part of the team without which it is impossible to reach the final goal.

How to Create a High-Performing Team?

There are a few simple, but effective steps that leaders should consider when organizing a high-functioning team.

• Create a stable, balanced team composition

Remember that team building is a long-lasting process, which might take up to several years. Reaching team stability might be tough, people tend to come and go, neglect their responsibilities, or show no interest. It’s up to the team’s leadership to motivate people to stay and act as a team. Complementarity, as a basic condition to make a team function as one entity. It means that each person in the team supplements all others. Each role is important — not only senior specialists contribute to the team’s success, but also all others too. Don’t forget this.

• Build a cohesive value dynamics

Cohesion in a team means that all members possess bonds that link them to one another and to the whole group. Cohesion cannot be reached overnight — it takes time and diligence to achieve them. A high degree of cohesion in a team provides a free stream of information and builds trust among team members which leads to increasing overall performance.

knows his area of responsibility and the scope of tasks he is expected to perform. In a well-balanced team, each question, such as “who makes a final decision?” and “who does a specific task?” does not appear. If the leadership can correctly instruct each team member what his role is, many problems do not appear at all.

• Set Measurable Goals

The difference between effective and ineffective goals, are among others, their measurability. By setting measurable objectives, you will make the team more effective as well: they will have a clear understanding of the final point of their work, be more focused, persistent, creative, and tactile. Moreover, you will give yourself an instrument to measure their performance and assess how functional they are.

• Encourage an environment of open communication & feedback

Team members often hold themselves back from voicing their opinions and thoughts in meetings, because they feel too vulnerable, or too insignificant to do so. This lack of psychological safety is counter-productive, and leaders should take care to build a working environment that fosters interpersonal risk-taking. Let your team know that each opinion matters. This kind of team culture will motivate employees, encourage innovation, and help take new ideas to implementation levels.

• Stress on the importance of learning

Successful teams never stop progressing because technology is continuously evolving. Thus, the essential tech skill these days becomes the ability to learn and regularly level up skills. Remember that learning is not only something achieved at courses and educational events. A significant amount of education occurs informally between team members. Create an environment in which people are open to sharing their ideas, knowledge, and experience. Open discussions, brainstorming, and other collective practices are always a good idea.

• Be prepared to scale a team

The successful team always tends to grow together with its project. Therefore, you need to have a plan on how to expend in advance before the time comes to it. A team leader should assess in advance the scale of the possible growth, hire the right people, and prepare them to join the project with all the necessary knowledge and skills.

How NIX Manages and Scales Teams

To us at NIX, each project is unique, demanding thorough work on the feature set precisely tailored to achieve the client’s business goal. Ever since we started working on the first project back in 1994, we have taken on the responsibility for the сlient’s software products and treated their goals as our own. This mindset led us to success and allowed NIX to acquire a large project- and product- management experience while delivering results to the major corporations from Healthcare, EdTech, Biopharmaceutics, Workforce Management, and other industries.

Throughout 25 years of work, our experience has solidified into a definite approach of streamlining the work on the project. Following this, we deliver value to our long term clients and keep gaining the trust of new ones by providing them with the properly tuned work process, a transparent vision of progress, effective communications, access to the broad expertise, proactive world-class team, and full commitment to the client’s best interest and success. At the end of the day, when tech expertise goes without saying, the ability of the offshore team to perform and deliver could be the only thing that really matters.

Kicking off the project

From our end, the work on the project begins long before the contract is signed with deep research of the client’s needs and desires. Here is what it involves:

• Ground-research the domain and business
• Draw up the work process
• Identify the right people in our end to perform the project tasks
• Scale the knowledge and set up its transfer
• Establish tight communication with the stakeholders
• Proofread and improve the business idea if needed

This stage allows the team to get ready for a quick launch and be prepared to solve domain-specific issues. It may seem that this stage can take much time, however, our experience allows us to be ready to start immediately.

Putting the team together

When approaching us at first, the Client is usually quite precise about who they want to see working on their project. Commonly, they imagine a ‘rockstar team’ of senior-level specialists only, equalizing the tech skills and years of experience to the ability to deliver. However, our experience shows that by requesting ‘seniors only’, in fact, the сlient means “I am looking for reliable results.” Such results can be achieved by a thoughtfully collected team and the right process, rather than by the individuals.

Our vision of the winning team features:

• Sharing the Client’s values and goals
• The right ‘field players’ on the right positions: carry (strikers), defense (support), playmakers and motivators
• The proper balance of mature experts and ‘hungry’ young talents
• First-class management staff with a robust set of strategies and tactics
• Proactivity and ability to learn fast when needed
• The ability of each team member to voice their opinions

Brought together in one team, these features guarantee high & effective performance, balanced time-to-market, absence of conflicts between team members, sufficient level of expertise, and satisfaction of the client.

Scaling the team

Different team types scale differently. One of the benefits of the offshore tech team is its flexibility. Almost any group can be outfitted in a short time frame. According to the client’s business goals, a team can grow or shrink. The former happens for several reasons:

1. A client understands that his business needs tech reinforcement.
   This can happen in several occasions:

• A client doesn’t have an onsite tech team, but he has specific business goals which he can’t reach without tech specialists; In a best-case scenario, an offshore team becomes an R&D center for the client.
• A client has an onsite team which can’t cope with the entire scope of tasks. In this case, an offshore team boosts the client’s capabilities;
• A client’s team is not skilled enough or doesn’t have enough expertise in a particular domain. Then an offshore team becomes a proper solution too.

2. NIX Project Managers initiate team expansion when they notice that the current workflow is not effective and doesn’t allow us to reach the client’s goal. In this case, we analyze who’s missing in the project and suggest a client add this position into the team’s structure.

However, sometimes teams tend to shrink. There are several reasons for this:

1. The client cuts a project’s budget;
2. The team reaches the project’s goals and transfer the project to the maintenance stage;
3. Particular position in the team doesn’t match the expectations;
4. The project is closed.

During our 25 years of experience in team & project management, we have gone through massive expansions (triple growth in two weeks) as well as quick size reduction. This experience has taught us how to act in both situations without losing a client’s trust and keeping warm relationships within a team. Generally, it’s very natural for a team size to grow when the project is in an active development stage. The opposite — decreasing — process is natural as well. It naturally happens when the project’s goals are reached, and there are only a few people required to maintain the products’ functionality. Other cases are rather rare.

The ability to assemble project delivery teams and fill contract positions with the required skills in a quick time frame often is crucial for the project’s success. For long-term projects and corporate accounts, NIX maintains a bench of up to 10% of the account size. A project bench is used as a resource pool to extend the current team or provide a replacement in a timely manner. Bench resources complete all necessary onboarding as core team members and ready to be productive from day one.

To address tangible extensions, we appreciate joint long-term planning in advance. There is always an on-going discussion channel between NIX and the client’s leadership as for the project’s perspectives and possible resource needs for the upcoming 6–12 months. This approach allows not only to identify the right people but also to provide all necessary preparations such as project-specific training and team building to provide the best possible result on time and in the highest quality.

Scalability Process

Team growth begins with an understanding that the existing team is not enough to cover all the needs. The speed of the team growth depends on multiple factors, but in urgent cases, almost any NIX team can double or even triple within two weeks. This speed is possible thanks to our onboarding plan, unique staffing method, and the constant preparation of new specialists.

When the expansion process is the client’s initiative, he contacts an Account Lead of the project, who in turn specifies:

• which human resources are required
• which tasks should be completed by this reinforcement
• which qualification is needed to fulfill these tasks
• what are the temporal limits for this position

When all these questions receive the answers, the Account Lead checks whether there are available specialists that correspond with the requirements. Here begins a whole new process — resource staffing.

If there is an available candidate for this position, Account Lead offers this person to a client. Then follows an interview for this position and in case of success — the trial period. After the client’s approval, an onboarding process begins, which introduces to a new person the team, it’s goals and his responsibilities. This period also covers technical introduction: code or system examination, working instrument analysis, etc.

A similar process happens when the initiative comes from our side.

Summing Up

So what is a high-functioning team? It is not only the most effective team which can drive your company to the planned business results in the shortest terms. It is also such a team that can quickly and effectively adjust to the changing business environment and flexible business objectives. To do so a team should be able to scale in both directions — shrinking and growing. This is one of the most valuable soft skills nowadays, and all of the NIX teams possess it. Our tech experts are not only placed on the right positions and are perfectly trained to interact with each other as a team, but are also managed by perfectly skilled Project Managers and supported by Business Analysts. All together this makes our team a reliable and robust tech reinforcement for any business.