How we help digital agencies scale their teams and service more clients

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If you are part of a digital agency’s team, you surely go through periods of time when work volume becomes hard for your in-house team to handle all by themselves.

This can not only have a negative effect on your business and your clients, but it can also take a toll on the morale of your employees, who may feel overloaded with tasks and pressured by deadlines.

Growing an internal development team in short time frames is no easy task, and it’s made harder by the effort involved in finding the right talent that fits in with the work and processes of digital agencies.

That is why many US agencies and businesses have successfully turned to the strategy of partnering with nearshore development teams in order to scale their operations on demand whenever they need to.

A Short Staff Augmentation Case Study: Building trust and growing together

For the past four years, our nearshore team at Vairix has been working in partnership with a development company from the United States, and through this partner we get to carry out a wide range of projects both for digital agencies and final clients.

This partnership began in mid 2016 when our partner first reached out to us due to our expertise in Ruby on Rails development. Their team needed to onboard an extra developer in this technology for one of their projects, and that is how our work relationship began.

This first collaboration lasted two months and allowed us to get to know each other and build trust, which resulted in our partner asking us to jump into more and more projects as time went by. So we then started collaborating on projects involving different business verticals and using technologies like Ruby on Rails, React, React Native and Node.

Throughout our ongoing partnership, we have helped carry out more than thirty projects, allocating anywhere between eight and twelve developers at a time to our partner’s team for different projects when they are overloaded with work.

Our Processes and Workflow

Aside from providing the right talent for each of the projects we are entrusted with, we have put a lot of focus on replicating and implementing the processes used by our partners.

This might seem trivial at first glance but in our experience this approach to Learn more about our approach to remote team management has been one of the keys to the success of our work together.

By following our partner’s communication practices and methodologies, we are able to provide added value at the time of joining any external team, by reducing learning curves to a minimum and helping improve project dynamics.

Examples of this can be mastering effective communication through tools like Slack, where we usually join our partner’s project channel and strive to be responsive and accountable.

We also follow the best practices in terms of Agile methodologies by attending all Scrum ceremonies such as daily, planning and retrospective meetings to exchange feedback and improve both our work and processes.

Onboarding and Contracts

One of the most frequent questions we get from potential partners is what the onboarding process of the hired developers would look like.

And this is actually much more simple and straightforward than it might seem: after an initial conversation, where we evaluate their specific needs, we suggest the best fits from our our developer talent pool.

Our partner then receives resumes for each of the candidates and has the ability to interview them, have them perform any necessary tests, and we are also open to short trial periods where they can get to see our developers’ capabilities first-hand.

And when it comes to contracts, we usually sign a standard MSA and SOW staff augmentation contract provided by our partners and governed by the laws of their home state. And we can also sign NDAs if required.

Once the contract is agreed upon and signed, you are all set to start working with your new team.

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Results

Our ongoing partnership is working out great for both parties: our partner has been able to grow on demand to service new and existing clients, and we are happy to know in 2019 they were featured as an Inc 500 “Fastest Growing Companies” honoree, as well as a top digital agency on Clutch.

And from our end, the team has received great expertise in terms of project variety and complexity, technologies, and methodologies.

If you would like to read a first-hand review of our team done by our partner, you can find it in our Clutch profile. We are also featured as a top app development company of 2020 on DesignRush.

And if you would like to learn more about our recent work as a nearshore software development company, get in touch to meet the team and discuss how we can help you reach your goals.

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