Executive Summary
We've worked with our partner, an Austrian based software development agency, on several projects in the past. Due to increased scope of work, they asked if we could help them meet the project goals by outsourcing a couple of our senior developers to join their team.
While we usually prefer to maintain coordination of our internal team, we had some downtime between projects. So, in order to honor our collaboration until that point, we agreed to help them out.
Our developers integrated seamlessly into their team and quickly established technical authority on the project, thus massively boosting the progress of development on multiple project for the end client.
They provided us with some team members to work on a couple of our projects. We’re building a website for a New York-based real estate company, which is a fully custom, ground-up implementation.
Challenges and objectives
As stated above, when providing team augmentation services, we prefer to outsource teams in order to maintain internal coordination within the team. This gives us ability to coordinate with our clients and swap developers in and out of the project with minimal risk of jeopardising the success of the project.
We hire only top developers; as a Toptal partner we currently employ 4 developers that have successfully gone through Toptal's highly rigorous screening process. Even though most of our developers have extensive freelancing and remote work experience, all of our collaboration with the client up until that point was by providing internally managed teams. Removing the central point of communication between our team and the client's team could have posed a risk to the project.
Additionally, while we have extensive in-house experience with Javascript and ReactJS, the project required Typescript developers. Even though our developers had some experience with Typescript, it was unclear how long it would take before they became proficient and productive.
How we helped
Before joining the project, we organised several Typescript workshops to get up to speed with the nuances of the language.
As a guarantee of quality, we assigned our top developers. They quickly integrated into the client's team and quickly started extensively contributing to the project, both technically and by taking a firm grip on the business domain and domain language.
Our contribution helped our client and the end client increase the speed of production and launch additional projects supporting their core flexible workspace platform.
Results
The initial requirement was outsourcing two quality engineers for a few months. As our developers took control of many technical aspects of the business domain, they ended up spending over two and a half years working on multiple projects supporting the end client's business.
As the end client's business grew, they ended up setting up their own development team, and following a seamless transition of code and production systems, our engagement came to an end
Everybody is very happy with their work.
Future plans
We continue to work regularly with our client on different projects, ranging from outsourcing developers, internally managed teams, all the way through to full product delivery.
The end client continues to grow and currently operates offices in over 15 cities around the world, planning to extend further in the near future.
