Oliver Ray
Managing Director, number8
2021 is only a week away and for most companies that means budgets are locked in and new projects are beginning. With decisions now finalized, the conversation turns to making sure head count and team alignments are where they need to be to get new initiatives delivered. This is the time of the year that leadership and management come together to lay the course for the coming year.
A recent PwC poll highlighted post-pandemic expectations for remote work and how the majority of American office workers would like additional remote work options. A whopping 72% of workers interviewed wanted to work remotely at least two days a week and 55% of executives were prepared to make that offer for new hires.
Luckily, software development groups are generally ahead of other industries in adopting the tools, processes, and practices that allow for remote work to be performed at a high-level and many decision makers in these groups have already embraced new staffing solutions and vendor arrangements to increase their productivity.
These solutions can provide massive benefits, but not without a host of new considerations that need to be made to ensure that outcomes meet expectations.
Perhaps the biggest consequence to more organizations embracing remote work is that the race for quality development talent will become both more competitive and expensive for U.S. hires. To combat the additional costs and prolonged hiring processes that this situation will create, companies will need to begin considering their outsourcing options.
Unfortunately, for most software development organizations, finding new talent and qualifying new vendor relationships means both external and internal hurdles need to be jumped. And oftentimes, the idea of jumping those hurdles is so daunting that many decision makers put up with their underwhelming current vendors just to avoid it.
The number8 philosophy on helping clients achieve their goals is simple: find amazingly talented developers and blend them into already existing software development teams.
Foundationally, number8 is committed to helping companies deliver their products and services to clients with consistency and quality. We believe your current team has fantastic development processes that work within your companies’ organizational landscape.
Our goal is to reduce the time it takes for your organization to find, place, and onboard qualified developers. We pride ourselves on flawless execution, affordability, agility, and above all a long-term solution that not only delivers the high-quality results you signed up for, but continually improves the more you use it.
The core tenet of the number8 engagement model is the belief that augmenting your existing team is the most impactful way to get software built faster. number8 consultants work under your direction, in your process, on your products. We’re the solution when your team just needs a few more sets of hands. We augment your team, align with you, and never operate as a separate team.
We draw on your team’s domain knowledge and create deep long-term relationships with your team to increase your delivery velocity. Why? Because, the development teams working in your organization have spent time to establish and calibrate the processes needed to be successful. Why try to reinvent those efforts by standing up a separate team to work in parallel? number8 consultants supplement already existing teams and fit into an already performing software development process.
We’re only able to do this because of our proven ability to recruit the best developers and technical professionals in Latin America. We strategically focus on finding individuals with senior-level development and remote work experience.
Our candidates are always qualified and selected by our clients before they are hired on to their teams and we encourage all of our clients to use the same process they use when hiring an internal candidate to qualify a number8 candidate.
Now, more than ever, companies are expected to be able to immediately respond and react to emerging trends or changes in their market. This demand for agility coupled with the growing complexities of large-scale systems, makes extended daily interactions for software development teams imperative.
Business challenges today require side-by-side collaboration between developers and internal users. This simply cannot happen consistently when half the team is sitting on the other side of the world.
At number8, we believe deeply in the value that agile software development provides, but we don’t believe in blindly following frameworks and standards that claim to solve every point of friction in the development process.
Delivering working software is the key metric for us and our 22 years of experience in software development staffing has taught us, the Scrum Framework is the best way to make that happen.
2020 marks the 10th Anniversary of The Scrum Guide and the 25th Anniversary of the birth of Scrum itself. This quote from this year’s Scrum Guider drives this point home: “The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory.”
Staff augmentation with number8 is both flexible and low-risk. Most of our engagements begin with a single developer, but almost all of our clients have hired additional number8s after realizing the quality of talent we are able to provide for their teams. We do not believe in staffing as many people as possible on your teams, but in filling the gaps that your current teams have.
The first step to partnering with number8 is an introductory call to make sure we are looking for the right skill set for your team. We take a holistic approach, looking for both the tangible technical skills and the right personality type to integrate with your team. In this introductory call, we like to understand your organization as much as we can. Though we tend toward using Scrum or other Agile frameworks at the micro-team level; we always like to maintain a macro view of where your organization is headed so that we can help our consultants grow along with your organization.
The last component of this introductory conversation is getting to know the development environment our consultants will be working in a bit better. This allows us to make sure we can guarantee our consultants are productive on day one of the engagement.
Simplicity and transparency are our top priorities when working with a new client.
We know you’re busy and have work to get done, which is why we’ll deliver qualified candidates to your inbox within two weeks.
Our Master Service Agreement is 4 pages. Onboarding is key to a strong working relationship and we spend a lot of time making sure we get this right. Though it may seem counterintuitive, it is far easier to onboard one person every few weeks than it is an entire team at once. As we’ve seen with existing clients onboarding gets easier with every person you bring on.
As the engagement with number8 progresses the thing that often stands out the most for clients is how well our consultants blend in with the existing team. As one client put it:
“Over the years, our experience has shown us that number8 isn’t your typical contract scenario. We have number8s that have been with us for over 10 years. To us, their consultants are, for all intents and purposes, considered employees. In fact, several number8s are in leadership roles because they grew to become the most trusted people within certain teams.”
This isn’t an isolated scenario 80% of number8 consultants have been on their current engagement for over 6 months and 75% of current number8 customers have hired additional number8 consultants.
number8 is an award winning company with over 22 years of software development staffing experience. In that time, we’ve partnered with Fortune 100 companies, small tech startups, and international corporations to place over 200 Latin American consultants in some of the best scrum teams in America. Our consultants aren’t just good developers, they join your team with the right experience to ask the right questions and get up to speed quickly.
Provide your information to talk with a number8 Account Executive about your development needs today and feel what it’s like to be listened to before being sold a solution.
Let us help you add highly skilled, versatile developers to your team.