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Project Management

Tech needs talent – how to build hybrid teams to deliver on innovation & ROI

date: 18 August 2022
reading time: 5 min

Today, companies are under constant pressure to be both innovative and competitive: they need to focus on costs, customer service and on compliance, but at the same time they are becoming more inundated with maintenance of legacy platforms. Last but not least, everything has to be delivered under huge time pressure and often within tight budgets.


How to balance all those needs with a job market that is increasingly difficult and expensive, given the global gap in IT talent pool?

How to motivate and retain employees, when you finally manage to find and employ them?


Competitive job market

Statistics confirm that the job market today is not really favourable for employers. Almost one in five UK workers say they are likely to change jobs in the next twelve months, looking for better pay and bigger job satisfaction.

PwC stated we are now in the time when workers start to “assert their power” – candidates have higher expectations, want their employers to be inclusive, working-from-home-friendly, flexible and to pay more money.

At the same time, companies confirm that for 76% of recruiters the biggest challenge is to attract quality candidates.

The economic outlook may be uncertain but highly skilled workers are in hit demand and employers can’t be complacent.
Kevin Ellis
Senior Partner and Chairman, PwC UK


Difficult to predict ROI, challenging competitors

The challenges do not end here. Many CIOs find they are under increased pressure to justify big budgets and IT spends where ROI on their projects is foggy – and we all know that trying to estimate the exact ROI of any software project is a guesswork.

To make it as accurate as possible and use it to convince the board about the need for an increased budget, you need the right IT specialists, experienced in the kind of projects you are about to work on. So again, it all goes down to the right people – a rare commodity that is difficult to retain.

The technology innovation lifecycles are getting increasingly shorter which is why the need to continually innovate whilst maintaining legacy stacks is constantly growing.
Geoffrey Moore
Crossing the Chasm

With the innovation in mind, lots of companies (such as those from financial services sector) have tried to become software houses as well as being banks. But the complexity of projects they were about to launch and the difficulties in demonstrating ROI from these projects proved too problematic.

Digital transformation is a complex process and there is a lot of pressure to deliver more with less which often causes a conflict of interests and forces companies to retrench into their areas of expertise.


Looking for a remedy

Companies must find a way to provide their staff with interesting work and career progression to keep them feeling valued and earn more money, while CIOs need to balance their pressures and deliver on their KPIs to the board and internal stakeholders.

You do it all or you loose – it’s as simple as that.

One solution is to recruit new employees that would deal with all your HR challenges. But they are a fixed cost, you need time to find and train them, and, in the end, they will inevitably need to compete with thousands of exciting FinTech companies. Internal HR recruitment teams are always competing with other companies who offer interesting career progression opportunities and benefits, including unlimited holidays and flexibility of home working etc.

Another solution is to go for external HR agencies. They may provide you with good employees, but they might not immediately get your culture and way of working, and they may charge you high fees. Not to mention their conflicting priorities, which you may not know about but which may work to your disadvantage.

But the options don’t end here. You can also decide on a collaboration with an IT partner. When needed, they will give you access to the right talent pool, so necessary to build hybrid teams around a core of employed team members, crucial for continuity and consistency.


Pros of having an IT partner

The are many benefits of such an approach: you benefit from your IT partner’s specialist knowledge, expertise, years of experience and make it all work towards your goals.

You don’t need to worry about recruitment or new responsibilities for your employees when the project finishes. This gives you more flexibility and ability to quickly adapt to changes.

You also get rid of the whole ROI headache – an experienced IT Partner has the skills needed to predict ROI. At the same time, you have more time to invest in your core team members, making them feel valued and taken care of.

What is more, IT partnership means much more than simply outsourcing. There are IT partners with Business Analysts and Technical Experts on board with whom you can create a high quality, efficient and realistic IT strategy to achieve your business goals. You can also focus on designing chosen features of a product and adjusting them to the end users’ needs.

Such a solution provides the balance between maintaining legacy stack and bringing new innovation to market, thus remaining competitive at all time.

By collaborating with an IT partner to create strategic partnerships, companies can focus more on what their shareholders are expecting them to deliver in terms of improved profits and dividends, while remaining competitive and sticking to their budgets and deadlines.


What to choose?

You know your company, it’s needs and challenges like no one else. No matter if you are running a high level digital transformation or just focusing on your day to day operation – you need competent people you can trust. And there is more than one option of how to make sure you have them on board.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Antony Bream is a Managing Director at Ribbit Consulting.

He is an internationally experienced UK Managing and Sales Director specialising in marketing, business development and selling of complex enterprise-wide software and professional service solutions, both in-house and SaaS, at board and ‘C’ level across manufacturing, media, publishing, technology, legal and financial services during the past 30 years.

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