Companies, from time to time, will lose much of IT team due to one reason or another and the company is faced with somehow carrying on until it can rebuild the team. This article talks about the pain of team turnover and how to plot a path to recovery and your options can range from restructuring and hiring to fill the talent gap to completely outsourcing or somewhere in between with a hybrid approach.

Why the Team left

Sometimes its hard to know why the team deteriorated. Other times, its very clear what happened and why and such events can come about due to a multitude of reasons.

• Company sold or bought
• Stagnation or low morale
• Budget cuts or downsized department
• Team leader left the company
• The project outgrew the team
• Project is on fast track to failure
• Wrong person at the healm

Where One Door Closes, Another Opens

• Departing teams can be a good thing
• Opens door to better processes
• Refreshes and reinvigorates stalled projects
• Opportunity to reaccess and reset

Taking Stock

Statistics show that the main reason why projects fail is a lack of confidence in the project’s success:

“75% of respondents admit that their projects are either always or usually “doomed right from the start.”

Why does this happen? To function properly, a team needs to understand the software development process, their roles and responsibilities, and believe in what they do. If you’re the one hiring and managing the team, then you are the one to inspire, lead and convince them the project will succeed. Do it right and you’ll build an effective software development team you can rely on to carry the project through to success.

If you’re not one to inspire a software development team to success, then there’s another way and that’s simply to outsource and hire a great team that’s already assembled. We’ll talk about both below.

Five Steps to Effective Teams

There are five ingredients to building and maintaining strong teams. They can be thought of as intertwining and constantly feeding one into the other in a continuous evolution that inspire the team to higher goals and refined levels of operation.

Step 1. Instill an appreciation of the power of teamwork. The team leader must be smart about identifying each team member’s skills and assigning tasks aligned with their abilities. Along the way, exposing and raising awareness of how each team member is functioning and contributing leads to the team working together. In effect, the team becomes aware of how their personalities complement each other and this cohesion is instrumental in driving a common goal and achieving it.

Step 2. Find the right people. Choose candidates who bring varied experience and perspective to your project. Building a team is about filling the gaps in the existing infrastructure. If all you do is hire five of the best Ruby on Rails developers then that’s a decidedly one-sided team. But if you hire a backend specialialist, a user experience designer, a dev-op, a technical writer, and a front-end developer and cross-train, then you’re building a diverse team that can learn from each other and their varied experiences will help you build a better product. Vetting differences with varied experiences will lead to better designs earlier and less technical debt to clean up later on.

Step 3. Learn to delegate. The team leader’s job: ensure the team can do theirs. Sure, the leader may perform some of the tasks of various team members at throughout the software development life-cycle, but the core focus of the leader is driving the team to success. That is done chiefly by delegating authority, responsibility and providing access to the tools your team needs. The team leader is the team’s champion up the chain of command as well as providing the structure, methodologies, communication channels, feedback loop that is singularly focused on continuously improving the infrastructure for the team to operate within.

Step 4. Track progress. One of the chief job of the team leader is monitoring progress and keeping the project on track. There are many, many systematic approaches from the classical waterfall methodology to the new age Agile or SCRUM approaches to software life-cycle management. All approaches at their core provide a means to define the work to do, scoping the release schedule and then sharing and collaborating on the project’s status regularly. These methodologies are designed to keep track of the pace of software development against the delivery schedule and determining whether the team is working well or if changes in roles or tasks or project scope is needed. The team leader doesn’t always have to solve the obstacles directly. Let the team flourish by letting team members resolve hurdles themselves. A team that successfully clears hurdles gains confidence in itself and is that much better at clearing the next obstacle.

Step 5. Celebrate little victories. When your team reaches a goal – or better yet, exceeds it – give props to the team members and champion the team’s success to outside stakeholders. Recognizing good work on regular basis keeps morale high and encourages the team to gel into an unstoppable force.

Five simple overarching steps is really all there is to building successful and effective teams. But all too often, team leaders lack the skill or time to invest in growing and maintaining a strong software development team. Team leaders without adequate technical background also create a strong barrier to attracting and instilling confidence in technically inclined team members. But not everybody can do this and sometimes those leading and overseeing a company’s IT infrastructure and product development effort are visionaries in their own right, yet not the best at building teams. This is where outsourcing can come in.

Outsourcing can:

• solve budgetary constraints – only working when needed to work – no full-time staff to keep around.
• eliminate the need to build teams and only focus on end-result.
• accelerate development times because the team is already assembled and confident.
• upsize and downsize as needed.

Outsourced teams can be your team, too! Outsourcing your development team can also solve budgetary issues with staffing full-time teams as the teams are engaged