IT managed staff: increase your responsiveness to develop new digital products through strategic partnerships

Keeping up responsive in face of your customer’s needs remains one of the greatest challenges in a post-pandemic world, which has dramatically changed how people work and companies make businesses. Lack of talented people, high turnover, and economic/geopolitical uncertainties make the decision to expand or not your team’s capacity a huge headache. It gets even worse for companies that are in the middle of their digital transformation journeys, as they are still learning how to cope with hiring, training, and retaining talents in the technology field, but also for businesses that have been born digital and currently are focused on other challenges such as keeping up exponential growth rates year after year.

Notwithstanding your situation, relying on a strategic partner that can help you increase the capacity of your teams to face the challenges ahead is essential.

Challenge

It turns out that was exactly the decision one of our customers in Portugal made. A company that creates digital content reaching millions of users on a monthly basis that has been recently incorporated into one of the biggest health conglomerates in Latin America. The idea behind this transaction was to take advantage of the huge inbound traffic to cross-sell products and services of a specific niche. However, in order to thrive in this initiative, the ability to develop, test, and ship digital products to production was essential. And that’s exactly where Objective played an important role.

Our customer’s dilemma was to bet on a team expansion led by their own staff or set aside other projects to make room for new ones. Expanding a team requires time, training, retention, and commitment in terms of budget and management. Deferring other projects was not an option, as all the in-progress portfolio items had their relevance to the business.

Solution

The adopted solution was hiring Objective to assemble a managed software development team containing all the needed skills to deliver the target product. Working shoulder to shoulder with the customer’s teams, in more or less 3 months we successfully delivered a high-quality digital product that could be deployed, tested, and evolved based on real user feedback.

Our process totally oriented to flow management has paved the way for delivering the first story in less than 15 days. In the following weeks, on each one of the iterations small tweaks were made which enabled us to deliver under high-performance standards as we can see in the metrics below:

• Throughput: > 100 stories completed in 5 months
• Responsiveness: 70% of the stories were completed in 16 days or less
• Quality: 94% of test coverage

A team effort that not only focuses on bringing talented people to the game but also keeps an eye on other important areas such as helping the customer to improve their governance, tolling, and SDLC.

And this is what the customer says about our work in this project:

“The project was to have its first main release in 3 to 4 months, and it was completed within that time. Went online with no bugs, with great unit tests coverage and a clean code. It was a success according to other development teams on the company as well as the management board. All the people from Objective were fast to adapt to the working processes and style. People’s behaviour is no different from that expected from company employees, with a significant higher professionalism.” (Head of IT, based in Portugal)

If you’d like to know more about Objective’s managed staff model, please reach out through this link.