One of the biggest roadblocks that companies face when scaling is the lack of resources – both in terms of budget and talent. Hiring an in-house team of skilled professionals requires a considerable investment of time and money, which might not be feasible for many companies.
Instead of dealing with time-consuming and costly hiring, companies are increasingly taking advantage of team extension to complement their internal teams.
Team extension is the process of hiring external remote professionals to expand your internal team without the commitments of a permanent hire. It’s a cost-effective and flexible way to tackle skill gaps, resource shortages and give your project a boost while preserving quality.
Here are nine key reasons why companies are increasingly leveraging team extension and the benefits of this approach:
1. Access to a global talent pool
With team extension, you get access to a wider talent pool without being limited to your local geographical area. You can hire skilled talent from anywhere in the world, which can help you find the best-suited candidates for your business and project needs.
2. Hassle-free hiring process
Hiring and sourcing in-house employees can be a time-consuming process that can easily take months. Especially in the tech industry where the demand is higher than available talent, and many companies are struggling to fill in the gaps.
One way in which team extension allows you to bypass the lengthy traditional recruitment process is by leveraging pre-screened talent that has already been vetted and trained by the service provider.
This can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on recruitment, freeing up more time for you to focus on your core business, meet critical deadlines and complete projects on time.
3. Increased flexibility
In software development, project demands can fluctuate, and having a flexible team size can be highly advantageous. The level of flexibility team extension offers is unmatched by any other outsourcing model or traditional hiring methods.
Team extension gives you the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. Whether you need to ramp up your development team during periods of high growth, or vice versa, you can do it easily without having to go through tedious bureaucratic processes.
4. Cost-effective
Besides being time-consuming, hiring and onboarding in-house employees can also be expensive, especially when you need to ramp up your team on short notice. Team extension allows you to hire tech professionals on demand, without the overhead costs such as office space, equipment, and benefits.
Moreover, you only pay for the resources you need when you need them making it easier to plan and stick to your budget without going overboard.
5. Improved productivity
Adding more team members to your project doesn’t necessarily mean that it will move faster. But one key advantage of team extension is that it promotes efficiency as it takes significantly less time for new team members to get up to speed on your project and start delivering results.
A reputable team extension provider can also provide recommendations from a technical perspective on how you can improve some of your processes.
6. Access to diverse technology stacks
If you’re looking for specific technical expertise to supply current efforts for a one-off project or you have a critical deadline, hiring permanent employees probably doesn’t make sense.
Instead, tapping into diverse skill sets through an external provider can hold many advantages. Most teams have exposure to new technologies, methodologies and various industries. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re entering a new market, developing a new product or feature, or expanding into different industries.
7. Reduced risk
Team extension can help reduce some of the risk associated with expanding your team. Hiring in-house employees comes with the risk of employee turnover even if you’re seemingly doing everything right. This can be costly and disruptive to your business.
Team extension can help mitigate that risk to an extent. You can build a flexible extended team that can be scaled up or down as needed to account for unexpected changes without the commitment of long-term contracts.
8. Foster innovation
Expanding your team with external talent can be a powerful strategy to ignite innovation, creativity and collaboration. Bringing in individuals from different backgrounds, experiences and points of views encourages the flow of fresh ideas and new insights.
This can promote problem-solving making it easier to discover unconventional solutions and improve processes. You will also benefit from a more dynamic work environment, where team members learn from, push and motivate each other.
9. Agile project management
Agile project management can help you adapt to changing requirements, prioritise tasks, and manage risks effectively. Team extension can enable agile project management practices, such as Scrum or Kanban, which emphasise flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development.
With an extended team, you can have a distributed workforce that works in parallel on different aspects of a project, allowing you to achieve faster development cycles and quicker time to market.
Conclusion
Team extension is becoming a viable solution to addressing talent or skill gaps in your internal team. It’s an effective way to equip small teams with a larger talent pool and less incurred costs – all this without having to physically hire in-house employees or sacrificing quality.
This creates an efficient system for meeting temporary demand and approaching deadlines without adding redundant costs or unnecessary stress to internal employees.
More and more businesses are recognising the advantages of extending their workforce beyond their physical office locations – to get the right skills, increase agility and maintain high quality.
