There are many further benefits of this approach in addressing under-capacity, including:
>Knowledge, coaching and experience is shared between BDO’s consultants and the clients’ operational staff during the period of augmentation
>The temporarily bolstered operational team has an uplift in capacity to drive a change in practices while keeping the lights on
>Morale in the operational team is boosted with an injection of a can-do attitude!
Capability changes: meeting new demands
Not all IT teams we review are in crisis. Some have been tasked with delivering outside of their usual operational skillset, requiring skills growth and new capability within the team. Some examples we’ve come across include:
>Establishing a PMO (Project Management Office)
>Introducing a new Change Management process and CAB (Change Advisory Board),
>Adopting a new Service Management framework and software
>Increasing software development capacity and improving maturity of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle)
>Implementing new software with associated configuration and business process changes.
In these cases, the first step is to identify the skills the team does have, and locate any gaps. Many clients use team augmentation as a faster way of obtaining specific expertise to close
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these gaps and of transferring the required knowledge to the team so they are then equipped with the desired new capability.
Team augmentation can provide excellent results where the organisation doesn’t fully understand what is needed and the requirements aren’t necessarily clear. A fresh set of eyes can quickly highlight areas requiring clarification, and can provide options based on best practice and successful experiences elsewhere. Sometimes a different perspective can help stimulate new thinking within an organisation, which is useful where there may have been long periods without change. Complacency can easily set in without being aware of it, and whilst comfortable, it is not conducive to innovation.
Team augmentation also works well where there is a desire to keep control over day-to-day operations, thereby avoiding any significant shift in culture. The augmented resource becomes part of the team, following the direction of the Team Lead rather than an external manager.
Removing the barriers
There are a few reasons why organisations are sometimes reluctant to adopt the team augmentation approach, but in our experience, the most common are overcome with improved understanding of the process.
In some organisations, the fear of becoming too dependent on a single provider, where further work and projects are continually required, can be off-putting. We mitigate this concern by having knowledge transfer built into the
deliverables and by making sure there is