Mitigating Risk in Scaling Capability

4 Part Series on Strategic Development for Emerging Market Developer

In the external game development space, we often are able to hone in on some amazing external talent after seeing the results of a test period in production, but just as often we are challenged to scale capability ending up with inconsistent or poor results.? With 18+ years of external development experience, I have always used my methods to help mitigate risk, from establishing training programs, to introducing scrum/agile methods, to on-site oversight of external teams. As I continued to work in strategic consulting in building up small external companies, I realized that as much as I was focused on mitigating the risk of scaling capability of billable resources, non billable management infrastructure was attempting to scale as well.? We began to see management overhead balloon to tackle the scale of the development teams adversely impact man-month rates.? In this third part of a four part series on strategic development for emerging market developers, I’ll dive into the process used to mitigate risk in scaling capability with external partners.

Maintaining Infrastructure

In any development, having principal-level resources among the team is crucial for success. I aim for a ratio where 30% of the team are at a senior level or above to guide the overall team towards success. While some emerging market developers spend years honing a few senior people to maintain quality consistency across a small team, it becomes challenging when the team becomes much larger with dozens of projects with 100+ headcount. So, how do we maintain a strong senior and management infrastructure while growing the team?

Overcompensating with Overhead

Companies often try to solve this problem by adding more people to manage the overall team. When closely working with service providers, negotiating rates often uncovers overcompensation of management. As a buyer, collaborating with our service provider enabled us to challenge the status quo and implement an effective approach to management infrastructure that supported a growing team while keeping costs down. This is where we dove into Situational Leadership approaches.

Situational Leadership

With Situational Leadership, we can adapt how teams are led based on the situation, meeting the needs of the team. Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey, who developed Situational Leadership in 1969, believe that there is no “one size fits all” leadership style.

Figure 1 shows the Situational leadership styles from left to right (S1 to S4), and the readiness of the team from D1 to D4. How I use this in external development is to take the team from D1 to D4 over time by implementing S1 to S4 leadership styles. The behavioral readiness of the team guides the type of Situational leadership style needed.

Applying Situational Leadership to ExDev

In external development, some call the initial start of an engagement the “Testing” or Pilot period. This 4-6 week period of production helps to vet out the pipeline and expectations before entering full scalable production. The next step is to enter the first milestone of production, taking the learnings from the pilot period and beginning to scale. After this 1st milestone, the team will scale to full capacity and become more confident, requiring little support from management, before proceeding into the long-term engagement with the team at peak size. We can map these periods of production to the situational leadership style to help build familiarity with the project and the confidence of the team to slowly build up self-sufficiency. Let’s see how all this pairs together.

1. Pilot Period (a few team members)

?? - S1 Leadership Style

?? - D1 Development Level

?? - While the team is insecure, a Directing leadership style is used.

2. 1st Milestone (scale up the team)

?? - S2 Leadership Style

?? - D2 Development Level

?? - The team is willing but requires coaching.

3. Production (scale to full capacity)

?? - S3 Leadership Style

?? - D3 Development Level

?? - With more experience and knowledge, the team is more confident but still requires occasional support from leadership.

4. Full Production (at Full Capacity)

?? - S4 Leadership Style

?? - D4 Development Level

?? - At this stage, the team is knowledgeable, experienced, and leadership tasks/roles can be delegated to the team, creating a self-sufficient team.

This approach allows external developers to maintain their overhead and rates, leveraging their senior leadership on projects when needed, leading the team to temporary self-sufficiency, while maintaining rates.

External Development teams can scale quickly with this Situational model of leadership, allowing experience and confidence of the team to grow during the start of a project and allowing leadership to initially direct and coach but eventually fall into a maintenance mode of support and delegating responsibilities, freeing up the leadership to move on to other projects that are running staggered and in parallel, creating an efficient management infrastructure and efficient overhead for a growing team.