Council Post: How To Grow IT Teams Through Service Accelerators

As President of Exadel SolutionsStrategies To Augment IT Talent Shortages , Lev Shur leads global strategy, marketing, and solution practices.

The demand for software development services is growing rapidly due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced many businesses to go digital — and go quickly. However, with this increase in demand, there has not been an equal increase in the supply of technology workers. According to a survey from Gartner, IT executives cite that talent shortages are the biggest barrier to the adoption of 64% of emerging technologies. This has forced the IT industry to rapidly adapt to continue to meet the demand for technological innovation, but how? Let’s explore how IT is leveraging different strategies to offset the talent shortage and keep transformation initiatives in high gear.

There are three main strategies that the IT industry is adopting to offset the shortage of talent supply: distributed agile development, development automation, and solution accelerators. In previous posts, I have discussed distributed agile and development automation — let’s summarize them here and then dig into the third strategy — solution accelerators.

Agile development combines tools and processes to keep teams aligned, productive, collaborating, and happy. Distributed agile is the evolution of the original agile concept, which called for the team sitting in the same location, even in the same room. The realities of today’s world force companies to look for resources far and wide, so agile needs to adapt. Distributed agile lets companies leverage talent in different locations, while still moving quickly.

Development automation comes in different flavors, all the way from low code/no code to DevOps tools, QA Automation, and so on. These tools and techniques let engineers automate repetitive, manual tasks, thus helping to offload teams so they can focus on high-value work, instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae.

The third strategy to help offset the IT talent shortage is through solution accelerators. What are solution accelerators? They are a combination of tools, processes, and best practices that are packaged together in one solution to help increase the speed and quality of large-scale custom product and platform development.

Solution accelerators help achieve two critical goals.

Drive down the cost and time of development without sacrificing quality. Solution accelerators help solve common problems that often cause development challenges or delays.

Attract development talent. Solution accelerators allow developers more ownership of their work by giving them an opportunity to work outside of the constraints of client requirements.

This second point can be a game-changer for IT services companies in today’s environment. With competition for talent increasing at an unprecedented pace, companies can use solution accelerators to help unleash the creativity of software developers.

Typically, clients dictate major technical aspects of the solutions they are asking to be developed. Solution accelerators are created internally by software development providers and give developers the opportunity to drive processes themselves, including requirements, features, market applicability, distribution options, etc. It also gives them an opportunity to try different roles like solution leads, product owners and even marketing.

Getting Started With A Service Accelerator

For example, one of my project development teams was plagued by the constant and time-consuming need to switch between environments (dev., test, prod., etc.) within their content management system. In-house technology experts were able to quickly step in and solve the problem themselves. They created a Google Chrome extension that let them switch between environments. It eliminated the annoyance of excessive switching, and they could share their new configuration across teams.

Thanks to this solution accelerator, developers now can work more effectively. In the process of developing this solution, the team members performed a number of tasks that went well beyond what they would typically do on the project. They did the market analysis, looked for different distribution options (open source and others), tried different marketing approaches to reach the audience that can benefit from this solution.

The following approaches are some of the best practices for initiating a service accelerator.

* An open call from leadership to solve a commonly understood problem.

* A suggestion from a motivated person on the project team.

* A hackathon that will either look for problems in a specific area and then identify solutions or have a specific well-defined problem with a competition to solve it.

Encouragement from leadership and compensation are two ways to drive participation. Depending on the organization’s budget, these may be offered in the form of prizes, bonuses, overtime or with “prestige and fame.” By helping individuals raise their profile within the organization it can help increase their standing within the community or the market in general. Often, people join service accelerators because they love what they do and they get a sense of ownership over the project.

The tech talent shortage will likely not end anytime soon. Conversely, the demand for digital solutions will continue to rise. IT organizations will need to tap into new strategies to be able to keep pace. Distributed agile development, development automation and solution accelerators are all viable solutions that can help augment this shortage. As this trend continues, there will likely be even more strategies that emerge to meet these challenges and I have no doubt that the industry will continue to deliver on the promise of innovation.

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Originally published at https://www.forbes.com.