When talking about a car, this decision comes down to your cost of capital, and other considerations like the amount of miles per year you drive and your desire to have a new ride every 3 years or so.  But what if you need a convertible one day, an SUV the next and on certain days needed a flatbed truck. It would be hard to buy all three, and if you leased them you would need very short leasing periods- days not years- to make it effective.

Limited tech bandwidth is the top challenge for 90% of companies

Enterprise companies have a similar decision  when they invest in designers and developers as full-time employees (FTEs).  The truth is custom software is still needed despite the hundreds of packaged software vendors and SaaS offerings. This makes tech talent, especially very experienced freelancers that specialize in mobile, more in demand than ever. There is a serious skills gap and backlogs are large. 

Without access to on demand technologists, companies face great challenges. It is difficult to scale resources to match technology experts demand.  Rapid proto-typing is a necessary practice and requires specialized resources, and on demand technologists allow for innovation in new fields with emerging technologies.

It’s no secret that you have to invest in your technical team and have developers, designers and dev ops people on staff and focused on your problems.  But as the world of technology evolves and gets prohibitively expensive, is the full-time employee (FTE) mentality still relevant?

Hiring is getting harder

Recruiting top tech talent costs time and money.  For certain jobs, after factoring in time and fees of recruiting, it can cost up to one years worth of salary to fill key jobs, and take six months or more in some instances to find the right fit.  Also, the FTE model requires a 30-40% uptick on base salary for benefits and variable compensation in this incredibly tight labor market. Factor in ongoing re-training costs to make sure people are skilled in relevant technologies which is constantly changing, and the investment continues to grow.

The type of talent you need– Mobile, Web, Front end, dev Ops– depends on the current project priorities and seasonal influences.

A better strategy as an Enterprise is to focus on customer connections, business goals, and planning. Rent all platforms access to help achieve these goals. Do not hire computer programmers and dev ops talent full time.

The future of work is remote

Younger generations are rethinking how work is done. In fact, younger generation managers estimate that 2 out of 5 full-time employees will work remotely in three years.

We call this the Fluid Contract Model. This provides you with focused expertise without having the overhead of FTE’s. It has made much progress over the last 3 years. This allows you to Pay by the drink for design development and project management talent.

Technology has made the world truly flat.  Because of great technologies like trello, asana, and jira for project management, GitHub or Gitlab for source code check-in and control, with automated CI/CD workflows and communication tools like Slack, Google docs, twilio and video conferencing tools like zoom, uberconference, and hangouts, these projects can be driven in a smooth and predictable way.

Fixed prices and outcome-based contracts

Full service firms provide a management layer for this great engineering and design  talent along with Dashboard, KPI’s, Governance, scheduling and Escalation. They have regular reporting with weekly project progress calls, and monthly service level assessment meetings.

Once a partnership is established, this allows for fixed price contracts and outcome based engagements.  This greatly reduces risk to the enterprise.

Smart enterprises are using  freelancers to increase productivity, access specialized skills and drive cost efficiency–  and doing it with the help of full service consulting firms with deep expertise in software projects to achieve great results.

Kannan Ayyar has overseen 100’s of mission critical software projects and is CEO of Grand Design Systems,(www.gogds.net)  a next generation consulting firm using highly accomplished freelancers and software experts.  Follow him at @kayyar1. 

————————