Well, we all still have objectives, goals, and deadlines with revised plans and budgets. The question is – have you changed the fundamentals of your playbook and toolkit and adjusted effectively? Baufest would like to suggest that now is the time to take a hard look and revisit your staffing model as one very effective lever in your toolkit.
Here are three lenses through which to look at staffing differently as a lever to accomplish your goals.
LENS ONE – Pay after delivery, not before
The structure of employee-led projects, including employee salaries and skilling and project planning and deliverables necessitates that your company is paying upfront for the time and work upfront. Whether your deliverables follow a waterfall, scrum, Kanban or other methodology, your budgets will reflect operating and capital costs before you’ve completed the project and before features and capabilities are in place to begin realizing benefits, let alone ROI. A co-development partner, however, can establish project plans, build a skilled team, and even deliver capabilities and features before the first invoice is even issued, let alone paid. At this point, you may already be experiencing optimized processes and cost savings without financial investment. In sum, you can shift costs from the current period to a later period simply by shifting your staffing to a partner.
At Baufest, we have built our reputation on delivering quality work for our clients on time and on budget We partner and share the risk on projects and help reduce risk while charging customers only when the outcomes are achieved.
LENS TWO – Control the “added” costs that come with employees
With any full-time employee, there are clear costs beyond the wage: benefits (medical and financial), paid time-off, promotions, and incentives to name a few. These are relatively easy to measure and well understood (but sill sometimes missed) during budgeting. Employees also carry implicit costs that are less well understood and quantified that can impact your project productivity including: training/reskilling, change management, mentorship, and career development. Finally, there are some insidious costs that we all hope to avoid: politics, bias and power plays are a few.
Though there is no discounting the benefit of having FTE’s on your team for specific roles, consider that a relationship with a partner clearly eliminates certain clear costs and the best partners eliminate or mitigate many of the implicit and insidious costs. For example, you should not pay for vacation or holiday time, skilling, change management or career growth.
LENS THREE – Have options in your project plan and project team
Leaders need options, and the more options you have the more levers you can pull to adjust and tune your business. Change is constant and today, the economic and business model changes forced upon most of us was quite rapid. Baufest clients have blended teams of both full-time employees and Baufest employees. Our ability to rapidly scale up or down, pause and restart projects and swap skills are all options companies with only full-time employees do not have available to them.
Baufest works with clients around the world in a model that can help you achieve the most amount of flexibility for your projects. We can accommodate rapid changes that come your way and ensure you have options when the parameters under which you work change suddenly.
Can you see yourself in any of these challenges, or does one stand out more than others? Take a quick second to let us know at US@bfdevweb.baufest.com.