CHALLENGE
To grow your business, you need to scale engineering capacity.
Scaling capacity
Every growing UK agency faces the same challenge: Capacity needs to scale, but the actual needs fluctuate. Expanding the team is one way of meeting requirements, but usually that takes time and creates a constant increase in operational costs.
Security and trust
Security and trust is one thing. While it might be effective for a single, new project, this isn’t the case when having to tackle multiple fronts - some of which may be supporting existing projects.
Working with different people every time also creates some hidden administrative costs since quality, communications, and sticking to timelines must always be overseen by someone at the agency to make sure there are no misunderstandings.
Culture
Finally, making sure that external contractors follow the agency’s culture is one of the most overlooked but most important issues that arise while working in such a way.
WHY AN EMBEDDED TEAM?
Working with an external team where you know everybody by their first name.
“Embedded” teams is a more effective model in such cases since they combine all the attributes that an agency would expect to find in its own team: Trust, culture compatibility, effective communications, quality of work.
An embedded team is an extension of the agency’s own team. Its members effectively become agency staff, working together as though they were employees of the agency themselves, following everything the agency does - from quality guidelines to tools and processes.
SOLUTION
Adapting to the way you work for a seamless collaboration
Tools and practices
The agency had to deal with a lot of support tasks for existing Umbraco projects, as well as new projects that came in. DotSee worked with the agency’s tools and practices and managed to extend the agency’s team without ever being perceived as a separate entity.
Broad scope of collaboration
DotSee undertook support tasks in projects that had been developed by the agency as well as new development and Umbraco upgrade projects, participated in internal agency meetings, proposal writing, effort and time estimates, even meetings with clients, overall doubling the agency’s capacity in a flexible way where needed.
Adapting to your workflow
DotSee continued using its own tools and processes internally, but this didn’t affect the agency in any way, since engineers quickly got the ropes of how the agency worked and adapted to the set of tools it used, from their source control systems to Umbraco Cloud accounts to PM apps to time management systems.
Ready to find out more?
New or existing websites, Umbraco or not. Ask Vassilis - he knows everything.
