How to Onboard an External Team for Maximum Success
If you are considering partnering with a software development services company or have already engaged with a third-party team, effectively onboarding your new external team is crucial for their success. To enable developers to start contributing efficiently and swiftly, providing them with the necessary support as they integrate into your organization is essential. Achieving the benefits of outsourcing your software development while avoiding potential pitfalls requires careful planning.
Benefits To Hiring an External Software Development Team
Before we dive in, let’s briefly talk about why you might want to hire an external team to help with your next software project.
- Firstly, outsourcing expands your access to a broader range of skilled professionals. Relying solely on engineers within your company or local area restricts the talent you can attract. By extending your search to external sources, you can incorporate new and diverse expertise into your team.
- Secondly, outsourcing can be much more cost-effective than using in-house staff. By offshoring to countries with a lower cost of living, labor expenses are reduced, and the time and resources needed for hiring, training, and onboarding are considerably minimized.
- Finally, you can streamline your focus and allow your existing staff to work on problems more crucial to your organization and its needs. By outsourcing lower-priority tasks or certain features, you free up your existing engineers and IT support to handle more important things.
Assess Your Business Needs: Steps for Onboarding an External Development Team
Before hiring an external team, it’s crucial to clarify your motivations and ensure that outsourcing is genuinely necessary. If you’re facing a significant project and having difficulty meeting deadlines or finding the right personnel, outsourcing could be a beneficial option.
However, you must also consider the risks introduced by an external team. Security becomes more difficult to manage when you include people outside your core organization. Additionally, culture fit is always a concern—you must ensure that the teams you hire from outside align with your values and mission statement, and with the personalities of your existing employees.
1. Onboarding the External Team
Successfully onboarding an external team can mean the difference between smooth sailing and disaster. It creates an atmosphere and sets the tone for the relationships your existing hires will have with their new counterparts. The type of atmosphere and tone you set will be up to you.
2. Pre-Boarding
Onboarding starts well before anyone is actually hired. Prior to bringing on new people, you should ensure that all your systems are well-documented, and managed by people who are willing and able to answer questions (not all engineers are!)
In addition to this, you may need to create some specific onboarding documentation about your processes and values, as well as technical guides and how-tos.
3. Setup Communication Channels and Frequency of Communication
The most important thing you can do when introducing new people of any type into your organization is establish clear and frequent communication. Encourage and model transparent communication early on, and make sure all new hires know who to go to with questions, and where to find materials and resources.
4. Knowledge Transfer
The next step in the onboarding process is the info dump. This will be critical in ensuring your external team has all the tools they need to succeed. It’s important to delegate specific people within each team to handle knowledge sharing. As stated before, this sort of thing isn’t necessarily a strength shared by everyone. Evaluate your existing team to determine who will be best to take on this task—it may not be the team leader or the strongest developer.
5. Tools for Project Management
Consider utilizing some tools specifically designed for outsourced project management. You will likely be doing a lot of remote communicating, so platforms like Slack, Zoom, Monday, and other online project management tools will be paramount.
If your company doesn’t currently use these kinds of tools, make sure to set them up well ahead of time to give your existing employees a chance to get familiar with them.
6. Monitoring Progress
Once the new external team is onboarded, you’ll need to monitor their progress—but before you can do that, you’ll need to lay out exactly what that progress should look like.
7. Determine Milestones & Deliverables
These should be solidified before you think about hiring an external team. Ideally, the decision to hire an external team will be made as you are thinking about milestones and deliverables, as a direct result of realizing that you may not meet these milestones without one.
Once the team is onboarded, however, you will need to communicate these milestones to them, and potentially work with them to finesse how and when they will be achieved.
8. Provide Feedback
This is a crucial part of your open and transparent communication with the team. Make sure that a specific channel is dedicated to feedback—whether that is specific to technical concerns, such as code reviews from your team, or more general feedback about performance.
9. Evaluation of External Team
Depending on how long the project will run for, you may want to include evaluation at multiple points along the timeline. For a very short project, a final evaluation should be sufficient to help you decide whether or not you were satisfied with the performance, and whether you will hire this team again.
For longer projects, midterm or quarterly evaluations are necessary to keep work on track and mitigate any communication issues or larger concerns.
What To Look Out for When Onboarding an External Team?
There are a few pitfalls to watch out for when onboarding an external software team.
The most easily avoided onboarding problem is waiting too long to start. Unfortunately, this is also the most common issue. Make sure your pre boarding documents are in order well ahead of time, and that members of your organization have been tapped and briefed on their expected roles.
The next commonly seen but easily avoided issue is unclear expectations. This is generally a result of poor communication and can be avoided by establishing clear and dedicated channels early in the onboarding process.
Checklist for Onboarding an External Team of Software Engineers
- Establish milestones and deliverables with your existing stakeholders
- Gather pre-boarding documentation
- Task existing team members with roles to assist new hires
- Meet with the new team to establish and refine milestones
- Set up clear lines of communication and encourage their use
- Monitor progress and schedule intermediate evaluations
- Do a final evaluation after project completion to determine success and plan for next time
Conclusion
In conclusion, successful onboarding of an external software development team is crucial for smooth collaboration and optimal results. By assessing your business needs, setting clear expectations, and following a structured onboarding process, you ensure both internal and external teams work effectively together. Key steps like preboarding, clear communication, knowledge transfer, and using the right project management tools are essential. With proper planning, support, and ongoing evaluation, you can maximize your external team’s potential and achieve your software development goals efficiently.