If you hire developers or other contract workers, you need to know how to integrate them into your process. Here are 7 ways to make it perfect.
Your dedicated development team works tirelessly to deliver a product or service on time. This may be difficult at first, but eventually the team will develop a workflow that makes it all possible. Soon, this team will be running like a well-oiled machine.
But then demand happens. Your product or service becomes popular and everyone wants to get in on the action. When this happens to your development team, that well-oiled machine can start to fall apart. Deadlines are missed, products aren't as thoroughly tested, and things get unstable and stressful.
When this happens, you can hire more internal talent or turn to external service providers to help reinforce the process, as with staff augmentation services. After all, more minds and fingers working on a project should equal a more efficient and successful workflow, right?
On paper, yes. However, the reality of such a situation is that it can be complicated to integrate these external service providers into your internal workflow. If you're not careful, this integration attempt can cause a special kind of confusion within your teams, which can lead to a disruption in your once-seamless workflow.
How do you avoid deficiencies? You follow some important guidelines to bring everything together and make your internal and external teams function as a unit.
Let's see how we can help you resolve these concerns.
1. Actively involve them
From the beginning, it is important that you actively involve external service providers. This doesn't mean you should just throw them straight into the mix and hope that everything works out. That's a recipe for failure.
Instead, you should make sure these external service providers are actively involved in the process. One of the problems you may face at first is that your external and internal teams will feel like separate entities. This is where the integration processes must begin.
This may simply mean holding Zoom meetings so external contractors can introduce themselves and begin to feel like important members of the whole. Anything you can do to avoid separation between teams will go a long way toward getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.
And with external contractors feeling part of the team, they will be more inclined to work harder and integrate more seamlessly. Explain how the contractors' experience fits your company's needs and challenges and allow concerns to be resolved at an early stage.
2. Make sure roles are clearly defined
At the same time, you must ensure that all roles are clearly defined. This doesn't mean that your internal developers should know that they are internal and that external developers are not part of the team.
If you only have individual experts as contractors, don't separate each team into, for example, “internal backend developers” and “external backend developers.” Instead, any external contractors who are part of the backend development process are simply labeled as “backend developers.” With these roles clearly defined as such, you will find that external contractors will more easily integrate into the workflow, creating a seamless process that does not cause stress or process failures.
3. Set clear priorities
You've probably become an expert at setting priorities for your in-house developers. Most likely, all of these priorities revolve around delivery times. If this is the case, you should already be one step ahead of the process and can integrate these external service providers into your already established priorities.
Priorities must be defined by your Product Owner and must be synchronized with the assessment of a Business Analyst or Project Manager. This prioritization should be reflected in your backlog and task division. Having clear priorities and a solid backlog should prevent scope creep and keep Sprints healthy and milestones on track.
4. Employ tools that facilitate communication
As these contractors are external to the company, it is essential that you use the necessary tools to maintain the flow of communication. Part of this means adding these external service providers to your team collaboration tools.
Say, for example, you use Slack. You probably have a few different workspaces created (like frontend, backend, database, and UX). You might be tempted to create a workspace for internal and external developers, but that would be a mistake. You need these teams to collaborate seamlessly, which means internal and external developers need to be together in the same workspaces. Additionally, if you separate teams by internal and external, you inadvertently put a barrier between them, which will lead to inefficiencies or (worse) an environment prone to burnout.
Tools and platforms are essential for everyone to work under favorable circumstances. Be sure to grant access and provide credentials to external team members early on in the project. You should also address any training or guidance they may need to get off to a great start.
5. Don't ignore your processes
These external service providers will enter the mix, already having their own processes developed over time. While some parts of your workflow (like the tools of your choice) may not integrate seamlessly with your team's processes, you would be remiss if you didn't at least allow them to contribute or learn how they work.
By giving credibility to the external consultant's process workflow, you may learn something new that can be integrated into your company's workflow. One or more of these outside consultants may use a tool you've never heard of, or they may have developed a much more efficient process than what you already use.
6. Learn how to better evaluate results
This can be tricky to navigate. First, results may differ between internal and external teams. Your in-house teams may be more efficient at first (while external hires get up to speed). You don't want to evaluate the results of your internal and external developers differently as this could cause a divergence between the two. In the end, this will have to be directly linked to priorities, so that results can be evaluated more fairly, in such a way that everyone feels that their contributions count and their results are on an equal footing.
7. Separate your teams from their silos
This comes with communication. If your teams become isolated, collaboration becomes a challenge. This can be especially difficult if silos are divided into internal and external, so that you have internal front-end developers versus external front-end developers, and neither of them communicate and collaborate well with the other teams.
Once your teams are isolated, it can be very challenging to free them. This leads to a breakdown in collaboration, which consequently results in missed deadlines (or worse).
Free these teams from their silos by continually emphasizing the importance of communication and collaboration. You can even move teams around after a project is complete. In any case, it is very important to prevent these teams from isolating themselves from each other.
Conclusion
The most important thing you can do as a software development company is to ensure your external hires feel like they are part of the team. They may not have an office at your company and they may not have benefits or shares, but they are an important part of the workflow you have hired to ensure things get done in a timely manner.
Make sure these contractors have all the context, tools, and information they need to seamlessly integrate into your workflow. Since they will become an extension of your team, you want to be thorough in evaluating your outsourcing partner. Once you've chosen the best vendor to work with, apply these seven recommendations that will set your project up for success.
