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ScienceSoft's Practice to Select and Assign the Best-Fitting Project Resources
ScienceSoft knows how much the project's smooth running and success depend on people. During our 35 years in IT, we've elaborated techniques to plan an optimal team structure and select the best candidates for the required roles.
Why We Take Resource Allocation Seriously
People are at the heart of any project. So, everything that happens on the project, the good and the bad, has the people factor in it. The team's impact starts already at the stage of project resource selection and affects several important aspects:
Project kick-off
A vendor can assemble the right project team and start the work fast only if it has a unified and structured process for resource selection and allocation.
Team performance
To have a team that performs all tasks within the allotted time, a vendor must properly assess the level of expertise needed for a project and provide the team with the right knowledge and skills.
Project cost
The cost depends on an hourly rate of team members that is naturally different for specialists of different seniority and qualification. The team's expertise must meet the project's requirements but not necessarily be advanced (read the most expensive).
Employee satisfaction and commitment
All parties win if a vendor factors in employees' interests and preferences when assembling a project team: clients get motivated workers, employees feel heard and valued, and the vendor prevents staff burnout.
A Cooperation Model Influences the Team Assembly Process
At ScienceSoft, we offer two comfortable cooperation models depending on the needed scope of our involvement:
We provide standalone resources who blend into a client's project team and do the assigned tasks.
We adjust the process of resource allocation and onboarding to each model.
Full project outsourcing
- We start by accurately scoping the project and analyzing the client's specific time and budget requirements. As a rule, the faster a client wants everything done, the larger the team will be.
- We define the roles we need to deliver the project, which can belong to the following groups:
- Business analysis.
- Product consulting.
- Industry consulting, compliance consulting.
- Project management.
- Software architecting.
- Software design.
- Programming.
- Testing and quality assurance.
- Infrastructure management.
- DevOps.
- IT support.
- To quickly find a perfect match for each team role, we keep all CVs of our in-house experts in a centralized tool and update them regularly with new completed projects, acquired certificates, and mastered techs.
See a CV example
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- For each role, we always assess the required level of expertise and never pick overqualified or underqualified resources.
- We don't just look at professional competencies. We take into account the interests and wishes of our employees because having team members who are involved heart and soul in the project is priceless. Just look at a couple of examples of such synergy. ScienceSoft's team assigned to replatform and redesign a gaming webstore was genuinely interested in the Customer's sphere and suggested a lot of improvements based on their experience as gamers. One more success story started from a shared interest of our client and one of ScienceSoft's senior developers in neural networks and turned into experimental development of a natural language processing module for the client's help desk software.
- To keep the process of team assembly transparent, we share a team structure, detailed description of each team member's contribution, profiles of candidates, and estimated cost with a client.
See an example of team composition
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- When the team composition is approved, we are ready to start the project onboarding process. It's also worth saying that we are flexible to adjust the team if the project requirements change.
Team augmentation
- To select the most qualifying candidates, we collect comprehensive requirements for the resources a client needs: tech competencies, experience, software domain and industry knowledge, desired rate, and the expected length of engagement and workload.
- Within one business day, we send candidates' CVs to a client.
- The next step is an interview with pre-selected experts. During the interview, the client can check the candidates' backgrounds and test their soft skills, which even an artfully written CV can't convey. We dedicate time for our employees to prepare for the interview and get to know the client's business. Commonly, interview scheduling and preparation take us 2–4 days.
- When the candidate is approved, we settle organizational matters. We always encourage a client to organize the onboarding so that a new team member can understand the current state of the project and the direction in which it's developing. This helps avoid costly reworks down the road.
- In staff augmentation engagements, ScienceSoft's experts join an established client's team, so we typically rely on project management practices and tools the client employs. However, we can fully assume the project management function, too — we have a team of 60+ project managers with experience in different IT domains.
How Resource Assignment Process Unfolds Inside ScienceSoft
We have a structured process of project resource assignment, which helps us staff new projects fast and control overall resource employment within the company.
| Position | Role in the resource assignment process |
|---|---|
|
Position
RFP Owner |
Role in the resource assignment process
Summarizes comprehensive requirements for the needed project roles in the project collaboration space. |
|
Position
Resource Manager / Department Coordinator |
Role in the resource assignment process
|
|
Position
HR Recruiter |
Role in the resource assignment process
Opens the vacancy and manages the recruitment process. |
How ScienceSoft's Approach to Resource Allocation Proves Effective
Fast team assembly
We commonly need 3 business days to assign resources to a project. Of course, the process depends much on the project's urgency and the speed of requirements collection.
Flexibility in resource replacement
With a team of 750+ IT specialists, we have the capacity to replace team members in case of predictable (e.g., vacation) and unpredictable (e.g., sick leaves) absence.
Monitoring the mood in the team
The lack of a professional match between the team members or with the client is a sufficient reason for us to revise the team composition and suggest alternative candidates.
What Our Clients Say about ScienceSoft’s Team
ScienceSoft is a professional and dedicated company. Their developers performed really well and we never had any major issues with their approach or delivered work. They have rescued us at times when we were late on developing the iOS version of an app.
<ScienceSoft’s> developers we are working with are knowledgeable, efficient, communicative, and are always able to provide a strong resource for any needs that arise. They are a very versatile company in terms of the number of services they provide. ScienceSoft is quite possibly the most beneficial outside resource we’ve ever had.
I was impressed with the excellent level of responsibility, communication skills, and mobile competencies of both <ScienceSoft’s> management team and developers. All the tasks were completed accurately, promptly, and efficiently.
