Team integration with external IT partners: How to Successfully Integrate Teams in 3 Steps
Looking to integrate a new team into your company? In business, the integration gap is one of the biggest reasons for project failures when different teams are involved.
If you’re considering partnering with an external IT services provider, the process of finding the right match could be challenging. You are probably wondering: Will they understand my needs? Is there a way to ensure I will get what I need? Even if they can do both, the question that probably troubles you is how will this new group of external people integrate with your in-house teams and cooperate smoothly?
Outsourcing or getting external help with certain parts of your IT development comes with great responsibility. It’s natural to be reluctant about new people joining your team. Whether they will manage to fit into the team and its dynamics is a valid concern. It’s like basketball — you could have all the best players, but if they don’t cooperate well, you will lose to a better-organized team.
Therefore, when choosing an IT provider, you should check their procedures and phases of the integration process with other teams (if they have them). Moreover, every IT provider should have monitoring mechanisms and an effective feedback system to improve their integration ability. This should give you an overview of what the process of working together will be like and it should help you decide who to cooperate with.
Here at Enlight Engineering, we understand that our clients need that kind of assurance and transparency if they are considering partnering with us. Therefore, we established a three-phased integration process, as well as some accompanying processes that allow us to learn from every experience.
According to Harvard Business Review, groups that would otherwise be successful can fail if team integration isn’t done properly. I will explain the importance of seamless team integration with your IT partner through our own example.
How to create the ideal team through integration
Reaching perfection is rarely possible but striving for it will allow us to form the best possible team at any given moment. Our vision of an ideal team is the one that allows us to minimize the turmoil of team integration and focus on the work as soon as possible. That means this team is required to be:
- Seasoned — The team should possess adequate know-how, not only in technical, but also in the problem-solving sense.
- Performing — The focus of the team should stay on creating business value for your company.
- Adaptive – We are aware that all of our clients have different working methods, so our team should be able to easily adjust to those methods. That will help them understand your culture and cooperate smoothly with your team.
- Efficient – Skills and knowledge of our team members should be complemented in a way that makes the team self-organized, cross-functional and capable of handling difficulties.
We highly emphasize that the process of team integration shouldn’t be a burden for you. You should focus on your business and it’s up to us to get all the necessary information through our procedures which will enable us to easily integrate. At the same time, the point of team integration and the goal of the newly created team is to deliver the product needed, while ensuring the quality level stays high and the time frame is respected.
Taking care of all those things would be a lot more challenging without the right procedures and mechanisms in place. Besides that, for a group of great individuals and professionals to become a high-performing team, the team integration process is crucial.
The three phases of team integration
If you’re wondering how to successfully integrate a new team into your company, we’ve developed a 3-phase system to make it as simple as possible.
1. The Setup Phase of team integration
Part A: Gathering information
The first and crucial step for us is to understand your needs and expectations. This will allow us to use our knowledge and expertise to craft a product specifically suited for your needs.
Before initiating a project with a potential new client, we want to fully understand how your business works and how we could help improve it. This is done through the Project Initiation checklist consisting of various aspects, which we fill out together during a meeting. The segments of the checklist include:
- legal
- scope
- time
- cost/budget
- team
- communication
- risk
- tech
We consider this a crucial stage because without fully understanding what you’re trying to achieve, we can’t help you as much as we’d like to. These segments and the accompanying questions allow us to do that.
The most important part of the questionnaire is the one regarding the scope of your project. Here we try to understand its main goals.
- What is the purpose of the project?
- What are you trying to create?
- Why is it important?
- What do you need us to deliver?
During this phase, we also ask about your priorities and create our working plan around them. For example, if your main priority is fast time to market with a stable product, we will define MVP (ensuring you receive valuable feedback from your clients) and implement automatic testing and continuous integration (ensuring the stability of your product).
Part B: Selecting the right team
Now that we’ve understood what you need, the key issue is finding the right team members to deliver that. Can we ensure the right people, and the best available experts will be working on your project? That leads us to another key part of the setup phase – selection of the team members who are best suited to deliver what you need. We have a procedure in place for this as well.
Based on your answers to the checklist, we determine what level of analytical, technical and organizational skills each team member should have. This allows us to employ the optimal resources for each project and select the best fit of a team for your project according to the questionnaire we filled in together. Based on this, we create a profile of an ideal developer and search for the best match. Rest assured that this assessment is thorough.
- Analytical skills include understanding requirements and transforming them into technical, having knowledge of software architecture and being capable of designing their own software components.
- Technical skills are related to the developer’s knowledge of the programming language in question, testing operations and handling databases.
- Organizational skills include understanding the SDLC, as well as leadership, communication and management skills.
Then we compare this table to actual candidates for the team and select them based on their capabilities. This is the responsibility of the Sales Manager, Chief Engineer (CE) and Chief Operating Officer (COO), as well as the HR, of course. Once we have our optimal team proposal, we bring it to you and consult you on it.
The point of the setup phase is to collect key information for the following two phases. It allows us to set a foundation to ensure the project will be successful, because without thorough preparation, that would be much harder to achieve. The product of the setup phase is a document consisting of all key information about the project, such as rules and norms, release plan, methodology and roles.
The end of the setup phase is marked by the kickoff meeting, when the next phase begins.
2. The Onboarding Phase of team integration
Once the onboarding phase begins, the Key Account Manager (KAM) and CE take the lead. Their main task is to monitor the integration process daily and maintain intensive cooperation with you. One of the methods to ensure everything is going smoothly is the biweekly meeting between KAM, CE and the Team Lead (TL). Why is the focus on monitoring in this phase important? Because it allows us to notice and identify potential problems and address them at an early stage.
According to the needs of the project and your preferences, an onboarding phase could be conducted either through:
- The Pilot Project — In this variant, also called the “trial period,” we assign a few people to work in your team, allowing them to fit in quickly and get the scope of the way things function. The risks are lower and if you are satisfied with the trial period, we include other team members who learn from our people who were in your team in the first place, so that burden doesn’t fall on you.
- The Buddy Model —Here juniors needing practical experience are assigned to our more experienced team members, who become their buddies and take care of their integration and performance, so that you don’t have to focus on their integration into the team, while you receive young and motivated professionals.
The end of the onboarding phase should mean that the team has successfully integrated, all potential problems were taken care of. This means the focus isn’t on monitoring anymore, but on performance.
3. The Performing Phase of team integration
Advancing to the performing phase means that the team has integrated, and the monitoring becomes less intensive. However, the biweekly KAM-CE-TL meetings continue in order to ensure everything is going as planned. The meetings between KAM and the client happen every month or two or quarterly, except when something is urgent.
Although this can be done earlier in the process, we use this method in the onboarding phase. We use it to ensure we stay on the course during the performing phase, which is called the SEMAT model. It is like a board game since the team is given the cards divided into 7 different aspects. Each card consists of certain requirements and once they are fulfilled, the card is moved from the left to the right side of the board, if the whole team agrees on that.
It helps us keep track of the progress and what remains to be done, since the cards on the right side essentially outline the current stage of the project. It also helps us decide on the priorities together and make sure we deliver what we promised.
Additional procedures for successfully integrating a new team
1. Feedback and performance improvement
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Even though we have explained our integration procedure and the team selection process, what if besides all that there is a part of the process that you’re not satisfied with or a team member who didn't fit in well?
Don’t worry, we are aware this happens, so in case you have a complaint or raise an issue with one of our team members, we have a procedure we follow to resolve that. Firstly, we ask you for clear feedback — basically, to explain to us what’s wrong. You should be specific and tell us exactly what the problem is, because if you say you simply didn’t like a certain person, we won’t really be able to solve that. Do they respect the timelines? Do they complete the assigned tasks? et cetera.
When you give us the feedback, we create a performance improvement plan consisting of specific activities in order to communicate it to the employee in question. Before we do that, we review the action plan with you and ask whether it will lead us to problem resolution. The employee agrees to the action plan and follows the steps to improve their performance. In case this doesn’t work, and the client still isn’t satisfied, we remove the employee from the project and assign it to someone else instead.
Moreover, we learn from every experience and share that knowledge in the company through training. The role of our Chief Knowledge Officer is to bridge the knowledge gap, as well as share and nurture the knowledge and skills in Enlight IT. That enables us to assure you that, should the need for additional knowledge of team members arise, our company will make sure this is taken care of. This is another version of a performance improvement plan based on the knowledge gap.
2. Continuous improvement of the integrated team
Finally, one of our main principles is to strive towards continuous improvement. There are several things that help us with that. Annual questionnaires where we ask our clients for their feedback are one of the most important ways to gain insight into the results of our integration procedures. At the end of every project, we also ask you for detailed feedback which our team members analyze and define their lessons learned — or key takeaways from their work on the said project. We use all the knowledge we gained in order to continue to improve our performance for every client that follows.
Choosing an IT partner? Keep these things in mind
In case you need an IT partner but are also troubled by the question from the beginning of this text, we hope we provided some clearance on what to look for when determining whether your IT partner will integrate well into your team, while delivering everything you need.
Make sure they have procedures in place to understand your needs and adapt to them, and not just give you the two back-end programmers with expertise in programming language you asked for.
It’s crucial for team integration that your IT partner understands the full scope of your project. Of course, understanding should be mutual — you should also understand their integration procedures, as well as how to raise an issue when it comes to that.
Finally, your goal should be to keep the burden of integration off your shoulders, so having an IT partner with methods to take care of that is a good decision that allows you to focus on your business.
If you feel like our way of team integration would be a good answer to your outsourcing problems and the procedures I briefly explained give you confidence that we will deliver what your company needs, we would love to hear from you and discuss how we could help accelerate your growth.
