How to Scale Up Your Development Team when Sudden Growth is Anticipated
Why Do Organizations Need to Scale Up Teams?
Entrepreneurs often face the uncertainty of sustaining a business when they start from scratch. This compels them to plan things in a lean way, however, when they experience growth another challenge is often there staring at them. That is scaling the team and the solutions, allocating meaningful resources, and keeping a control mechanism on the processes. Making sure that there is an efficient mechanism in place, which aids the planning and management of existing and upcoming projects is the key. At the same time monitoring the processes, openness for adjustments in sub-tasks, and communication among the team members is also paramount to the success of scaling the team and solutions at a juncture when the company is experiencing growth.
Why is Planning Important for Scaling Up Operations?
As we already specified, during the inception phase entrepreneurs are not sure about the success of the project and the revenue that can be generated, so they often prefer to work on a shoestring budget. Though that helps them in managing financial risks, it often leads to inexperience in managing bigger teams, multiple projects, and complex project management processes. So when there is a sudden requirement for scaling up and allocating resources, the biggest challenge in front of them is finding the right people in a shorter time, training, and inducting them into a complex environment.
Understanding if the need is Real?
As we know, the business and technology inter-dependence makes it crucial for allocation of the right amount of financial components and decision making and quick implementation of technology so that results can be seen in a short time. So the need is real when businesses grow fast and at this juncture, the expectation from the development teams are generally big.
To fulfill the above-mentioned expectations the team needs to be scaled to support the business growth, identify the trends, and ensure newly introduced tech skills in the market as well as if any skill sets are lacking should be added to the in-house team or a contingency plan in place to outsource the same to a competent entity.
How to Scale Up?
Before the scaling up operations are planned a team should be made for gathering information from the current environment and a detailed analysis should be made to understand the available resources, their engagement, and the pace of growth. A tangible measurement of the current scenario is very important whether a small project of web development is planned or a custom web development is being envisaged.
The analysis should include the current scope of projects, and milestones achieved. Deployment of developers in the projects and future requirements and deployment that may be needed to make sure the projects run seamlessly.
Once the information is available, it should be analyzed to find the gap in the demand that may arise shortly and the supply of talent and other resources.
A detailed discussion of the scenario with the members of the team who is analyzing the scenario is important. Members of the human resource department can provide their ability to do the headhunting and the timeline needed for them to hire new talent or to engage the existing talent pool that has completed previous projects and is ready to join new projects after a cooling-off period.
The operations team members or the project manager can give an idea about the induction of new and experienced talent into the new environment or project and the requirement of training and planning for the development.
Conclusion
Though scaling up a team can be a daunting task, with proper planning, communication, and analysis a goal-oriented report can be prepared and shared with the decision-makers who will make the financial decisions and give a signal to go ahead. There should always be room for modifications and improvements in the scaling-up plan so that surprises and uncertainties can be handled in a better way. When enough resources are available for a bigger organization, they can afford to keep a larger team on the bench and organize the team as per their ease, but for smaller entities and institutions scaling up operations is not only important for sustainability but also profitability and better execution of the projects. Hence enough data collection, the right mechanisms for hiring, planning deployment of resources, etc play key roles in scaling up the organization.
