Building great tech teams takes time, what if there was a better way?

The next work revolution is Elastic Teams - distributed teams of top tech talent, composed exactly as you need them, deployed exactly when you want them.

CTOs can have access to an on-demand, flexible workforce that is agile and has hyper-relevant skills and experience.

Recruiting and retaining talent while keeping the focus on delivering your product road map can feel like building a bridge as you’re crossing it.

CTOs face incredible challenges.

Project timelines can contract or contort. Recruitment processes are so time-consuming that the state of play when they are begun is seldom the same as when talent is finally onboarded. And it’s a seller’s market: good digital talent is like gold dust in today’s market, where even huge companies with prestigious brands like Amazon and Google are struggling with retention.

Meanwhile, running in parallel to this trend and in many ways reinforcing it, the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic fell have accelerated the most radical, far-reaching and lasting revolution in how we work that any of us are likely to see.

That said, many companies are still approaching this new reality with the tools and processes built for the old one.

Agile working, for example, has been touted as the solution to meeting these new challenges in this new context.

However, many CTOs find it in fact exacerbates their problems, committing developers to spend up to 20 hours a week in meetings – time they could otherwise spend being productive.

Agile allows leaders to adapt projects with some flexibility, which sounds great in theory but in practice often means a changed project staffed with the same team. This results in colleagues being assigned work that’s not in line with their skill sets, resulting in inevitable compromises on technical decisions – and compounding the retention issues that characterize the entire industry.

Distributed’s Elastic Teams model offers another way.

Our AI-empowered digital platform connects companies with the global talent they need, and it does it efficiently, flexibly and at scale.

Key benefits of Elastic Teams

The conventional catch and release system for recruitment is a black hole for time and resources.

You need to find, recruit and onboard talent before they can even come close to being productive.

Then it can take up to six months – and under current trends, the team members you have invested so much in will start thinking about moving on in barely a year. And so the whole process begins again.

And this doesn’t just sound bad – the stats back it up.

Tech firms have an average annual employee churn rate of 13.2%, rising to as high as 21.7% for software engineers.

Meanwhile, replacing an employee has been calculated to cost an average of 50-75% of their annual salary.

Elastic Teams, however, eliminate all this.

Offering instant access to a vast talent pool of skilled, security cleared, professional freelance developers and engineers, it allows you to construct teams ‘off the peg’ – and do it fast.

Flexibility

According to Boston Consulting Group, 90% of business leaders believe an on-demand workforce will be a core element of their ability to compete in the future.

Why?

Elastic teams have a significant flexibility advantage over agile teams.

The latter can create as many problems as they solve,

Elastic Teams, however, can be constructed from the ground up on a granular basis. You can break up projects into their constituent parts and access the talent with the specialized skills for any particular unit of work.

As CTO you can keep a core team in-house who act as guardians of your core practices, processes and IP. These are responsible for the ideation of your product and acting as guardians of the core idea’s integrity as it is brought to market. This group then passes the development work to an Elastic Team, a fluctuating and evolving group of highly skilled individuals with varying specialism depending on what the project requires at any given moment.

As your product moves through the development pipeline, you can adjust the composition of the Elastic Team working on it to make sure the skillsets of the team members are in total alignment with taking it to the next stage.

The team evolves in tandem with your needs, rather than rigidly sticking with one range of skill sets – making sure your core team can keep its focus on the high-level strategic work that matters, keeping costs down, and keeping turnaround times short.

Global talent

Given the capability of today’s technology, expanding the talent pool beyond your own country, let alone area, seems obvious. The likelihood of the best qualified and experienced team to work on your projects living within a 20 mile commutable distance of your office is pretty small. So why restrict your capabilities by limiting your access to such a small pool of technical talent.

And it’s a more serious question than Slack enabling collaboration between Californians and Cockneys.

Between the US and UK, there are today 1.5 million vacancies in software development. This is anticipated to grow by 20% every year for the next five years, but these markets are together graduating only 50,000 software developers from university.

The only way to make up for this shortfall is to develop new ways of working and to broaden our lens to take in a global talent pool.

Traditionally, outsourcing development overseas has been known for its patchy quality.

Elastic Teams solve this by ensuring specialists only focus on their specialisms – and that when they’re not working on your projects, they’re honing their skill sets on similar work.

A state of the art platform

Today’s working practices are often only as useful as the platform they’re delivered on.

Distributed’s proprietary platform automatically connects employers with the team members they need, streamlining the whole process with standardized security, documentation and coding practices

It takes the hassle out of building a team from scratch – and then having to do it again, and again.

Build a talent pool calibrated to your precise needs at each moment in time, balancing the best of both in-house agile working and outsourcing and executed via a platform that surfaces only the most dedicated, motivated and creative talent.

Watch Distributed's on-demand webinar "Accessing digital talent for your competitive advantage" or get in touch to discuss how to make software project delivery faster and more cost effective.