Resourcing A Development Team

Technical Project Resources

Resourcing A Development Team

The information in this guide is intended for general purposes only. For more specific guidance around your organisation’s projects, please get in touch with our team.

In this section, you will find:

Understanding what the project needs
Choosing the right developers for the right job
Combining internal developer expertise with contracted specialist skills
Navigating Matrix Structures
Planning resource for future phases of the project
Ensuring the tools and technology are there to do the job well
Establishing a robust project delivery methodology
Keeping your developers engaged and happy
Getting help to find the right people
Considering your BAU dev team requirements
Need guidance on your IT project?
Where to next?
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So much of the success of digital transformation and technology projects in business is down to the people involved. As part of ensuring delivery is timely, high quality and on budget, project management and sponsors need to ensure the team working on the project is equipped with the right skills and experience. Resourcing projects is often a headache for project managers, especially given the shortage of IT professionals compared with the demand in New Zealand for project resources – finding talent is just one part of the equation with retention on the project a real risk to many businesses.

In our work with organisations to deliver technical quality assurance on their digital transformation or IT projects, we provide guidance around building a team and keeping them engaged. In this guide, we’re going to talk about resourcing and offer some helpful insights that you might want to consider as you plan your next project team.

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Understanding what the project needs

Recruiting into a project team should come from a broader understanding of the project’s requirements. A technology-based project will demand specific platforms, skills and experience in order to deliver, so the project plan, scope and other requirements document can provide a sound reference for identifying the job roles needed. The project budget may also put parameters around who and how many roles are hired, although ideally the budget is determined by the requirements of the project, with sufficient resources outlined specifically in the budget breakdown.

The project sponsor, steering committee and in some cases the project manager will determine the competencies to deliver on each phase of the project. Resource requirements will often be developed in consultation with technical expertise and the wider business to accurately identify the specific experience and types of technical skills needed.

Resource needs can evolve over a project’s lifespan, especially if a certain element of the delivery is proving challenging or needs extra help to complete in a timely fashion. The project manager over the course of the project will develop a good understanding of their team’s skills and where possible gaps may be.

Choosing the right developers for the right job

Developers are not one category of professionals. The breadth of disciplines inside development, from software to web, front end to back, junior to senior and so on, demands that recruitment is approached carefully. Simply take a look at IT job listings in New Zealand, filter by developer and you’ll encounter dozens of different specialisations and experience levels. As you resource your project, you’ll want to choose the right mixture of the front end, back end, full stack, etc to meet your project requirements. Along with technical skills, it’s important to bring in people who have experience and knowledge that would add value to this project – for example choosing a developer that’s worked on customer-facing SaaS products to help build your customer portal.

Your technology project will require many different tasks to be completed. Aligning the best people for these tasks is a big step towards delivering the project within budget. Junior developers are a better use of budget for parts of the delivery that are straightforward, while senior developers can be resourced onto the more complex aspects of the solution.

Combining internal developer expertise with contracted specialist skills

Project teams in a large enterprise or public sector are often made up of permanent full time staff and contracted resources. This approach is a good idea for many businesses because it makes use of the skills and knowledge of your staff while bringing in contractors who specialise in particular areas. Staff typically cost less per hour but enjoy the stability of permanent employment. Contractors don’t have any protections as far as the duration of their work or leave entitlements, but as a result of this and their often specialist experience, can demand a higher hourly rate.

Project managers should look to utilise their different resource types effectively. Assign long-term staff onto tasks that benefit from their existing relationships and business knowledge. Use contractors on the aspects of the project that require their specific technical expertise. Of course this is not to say that internal IT teams aren’t full of people who hold these capabilities as well – the mix on your project depends on your business’s existing IT personnel.

Navigating Matrix Structures

In today’s modern, creative workforce, the business structure is leaning more on the ‘matrix’ model alongside (or sometimes instead of) a traditional hierarchy. A matrix organisation taps into the skills of people from across various business units to work on specific projects or initiatives. These individuals will often have traditional line managers for their professional development and general employment matters but their day-to-day work can be varied and interact with different people. This includes ‘reporting to’ multiple leaders.

Matrix structures aren’t flawless and rely on people and workplace culture to make the most of them. When IT projects are set up that include contractors and internal BAU teams, project managers need to ensure that there’s a clear definition of their available resources. They need to know who they can utilise to deliver, for how long in a day or week and any complexity around their priorities. By nature matrix structures are more complex for reporting and there are opportunities for conflicting guidance to team members who may be pulled in different directions. However, if the business invests time and effort into articulating individual responsibilities and the way in which resources are allocated the project can benefit from more subject matter expertise, information and collaboration.

Planning resource for future phases of the project

Resource planning isn’t a matter of picking your team for the whole project and getting on with it – people leave, get seconded, or the needs of the project evolve. There is some planning you can do at the start of the project to anticipate changes in the team. As the project manager maps out the project and its individual phases, the resource required to deliver should be planned alongside this. For some projects, the same team will be involved the whole way through. For others, a specific phase may require contractor resources that aren’t required in other phases.

Project managers should plan the onboarding or departing of their team, the better the project can work to budget and timeframes. Staying ahead of these changes before phases come up makes those hiring and onboarding activities better align with the delivery needs of the project. The objective is to reduce the waiting time for resources to come on board.

Ensuring the tools and technology are there to do the job well

A project team with all the skills to deliver can be rendered useless if they don’t have the technology at their disposal to create what you need. This occurs more frequently than you may believe in large organisations – computer equipment that doesn’t allow for efficient development or design work, or simply not providing the right applications and tools for the team to deliver properly.

The project’s budget and planning need to include the platforms and equipment required to deliver effectively. Insufficient or missing tools for your team represents low productivity while your resource costs don’t change.

Establishing a robust project delivery methodology

Building a team of experienced, talented tech professionals is one thing, but establishing the way in which they’re assigned work and managed day to day is a whole other matter. Your project should run through a methodology that informs things like:

How work/tasks are delegated out to the team
The meeting cadence of the delivery team
Communication with other stakeholders in the business
How ‘phases’ of work are completed

Whether your team is running Scrum, Waterfall or any other type of approach, you want to ensure that everyone understands the methodology and what the expectations are. Don’t assume that well-experienced tech professionals will be totally proficient at working a certain way.

Keeping your developers engaged and happy

A team that’s motivated and bought into the work they’re doing will typically generate much better results, faster than a team that’s lost clarity over the outcomes they’re trying to achieve. A project manager’s job includes making sure the team are all staying engaged with their work – and if there’s an issue, to identify this and help address it as soon as possible. Just because a project team may include contractors, don’t assume that team culture and happiness isn’t important. Keeping a team engaged can be done through a combination of factors but to start we’d suggest prioritising regular communication – this is where standups are quite beneficial. With regular comms, the delivery team can share and voice concerns and work together to resolve these with the project manager.

Communication is also vital when reinforcing the progress the team is making – again daily short catch-ups are excellent opportunities to do this. It’s sometimes worth creating smaller but more frequent milestones that keep morale high vs. striving for fewer big goals that may take months to achieve.

Getting help to find the right people

Project managers will usually interview the potential hires, but they’re not responsible for advertising and finding these people. Large organisations will often have relationships with external recruiters who specialise in a specific field (like IT) and actively seek out the best candidates to put forward to interview. This is often a good approach because the project manager can define all their requirements and delegate the time-consuming tasks of finding this talent to the recruiter – a project manager’s job is full of other demands such as reporting, managing the existing team and working with stakeholders.

Considering your BAU dev team requirements

The project is just a finite period in time, with many of these projects’ resources (contractors) departing to the next challenge after the job’s done. Businesses should consider how well-equipped the BAU IT team is to support and refine the solution or product delivered by the project team. This is why it’s important to combine contractors and permanent team members – the transfer of knowledge.

Consider what’s needed to continue ‘feeding and watering’ the system. It may be that recruitment into the development team is needed concurrently with the project to ensure there are enough technical skills to support the solution ongoing.

Need guidance on your IT project?

IQANZ provides specialist assurance services for technology projects across the private and public sectors. We apply proven assurance methodologies along with a high level of technical expertise to help guide projects and programmes to success. If you’re interested in getting independent, expert help on your technology project, get in touch with our team.

Where to next?

Read our other technical project resources:

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Preparing An Organisation For New IT Systems

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Waterfall IT Project Management

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Scrum and Agile In IT Projects

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