Every business comes to a stage when it has to scale its team to grow. By scaling your team, you can achieve the full potential of your business, as it allows you to serve more clients or build better products. But when it comes to scaling, 74% of businesses decide to scale at the wrong time, which results in the companies failing.
In this article, we discuss the same. We will talk about the things that businesses should keep in mind before they plan to scale. Also, we will be talking about the six tips you must follow while scaling your development team. So for that and more, keep reading.
The Most Common Obstacles to Growing a Software Development Team
You always have to face some or more challenges if you are running a business. Likewise, while scaling your development team, here are the common challenges you might face and should be prepared for.
1. Miscalculating tasks
There is no way to predict the number of people needed to complete a project if it is not properly planned. One of the most important parts of scaling is knowing the right plan for executing a project.
2. Lack of communication
Having a smaller team allows you to communicate effectively both externally and inter-organizationally. But, when you scale, there is very little to no communication channel between the core team and the end customer facing a problem. This is what businesses should look for to avoid mistakes in the future.
3. Managing a distributed workforce
When you have a workforce in different locations, it becomes harder to communicate and coordinate. Many companies use other platforms to coordinate and manage their team members worldwide. So, before you scale your team, you must be prepared to tackle and manage the workforce worldwide.
4.CI/CD and Scalability
Open-source tools are typically used to create continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines in one- or two-team businesses. This initial proof-of-concept might need to be more scalable successfully and regularly. The issue of team communication and environment provisioning arises due to the expansion of CI pipelines and the number of teams.
6 Tips to Scale a Development Team
- Reinforce the company culture.
It is critical that the people you work with agree with the concept and motivation you are pursuing. If the team members and the people in the organization do not agree with the mission and purpose of the company, it becomes very difficult to reach your destination.
You must hire people who respect and support your company’s culture and core values so that the management and the drive within every individual can match to reach the company’s vision.
- Prepare your team’s expansion
Preparation before scaling your development team is very necessary. You must know the growth plan and the number of people required to achieve it. The proper expansion needs to be executed, followed by asking a proper question. such as follows:
- Will the new team entirely design features that the client can see, or will they make changes to the system to accomplish their objectives? If so, a feature team will be involved.
- Will they focus on a certain element of a user-visible feature? If so, a component team will be involved.
- What work environment do you want to establish for your new team or teams?
- How will the new team(s) affect communication and cooperation among the present employees?
- Hire carefully
Business owners make the mistake of hiring new talents on their own, which is wrong, instead of hiring thousands of new employees for their organization. Hire 10 or as many department heads as are required, and charge them with finding the right people. If the directors are hiring, they’ll be accountable for new employees and managing them. Read here to hire Top Talent Candidates for Your Organization
- Keep your teams small.
A small, flexible team is always better to scale any business, as you can coordinate better.
According to Jeff Bezos’ “rule of two pizzas,” a team may be big enough if you can feed it two pizzas. Pizzas should generally be divided if you need more than two. Teams shouldn’t, however, grow haphazardly. If a group is not autonomous, there is no sense in forming it.
- Automate your processes.
When it comes to growing your staff, automation is vital to DevOps and CI/CD. As much as you can, automate.
Automate sanity, smoke, and regression testing first. Data-driven testing, stress tests, and load tests should follow. Make a significant investment in various automatic code checks, transaction notifications, and monitoring systems.
- Improve communication.
With distributed developers, in particular, managing large-scale software development demands well-organized, open communication. A strategy that works for both on-site and remote employees should be developed after reviewing your current communication methods.
Face-to-face meetings will probably give way to video conferencing, while project management and collaboration software will take the place of office whiteboards.
Conclusion
74 percent is not a small number. Companies fail in large numbers because they decided to scale at the wrong time with a bad strategy. We have covered the challenges for which you must be prepared beforehand. There are also some guidelines to follow if you are expanding your development team.
We cover such deep topics with great enthusiasm. If you like our article, do let us know. If you are willing to expand your organization, you must check out ezyhire. We make global workforce hiring in India incredibly simple for you. All you have to do is list your requirements, and we’ll hunt down the best talents from across the world. Talk to our experts now!
