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How to Overcome the Main CTOs’ Risks and Challenges by Working with Expert Soft

Every day, Chief Technology Officers face numerous challenges that bring headaches and make them build resilient strategies to find a way out. They struggle to enable consistent innovation, establish the best engineering practices, recruit and grow IT specialists. However, no one says overcoming СTOs’ challenges has to be so complicated.

A reliable, trustworthy and experienced IT outsourcing partner can take many risks off CTOs’ shoulders. IT outsourcing vendors who constantly work with the CTOs of large enterprises are well aware of the pains modern CTOs are going through and often know how to ease them.

Expert Soft has been working with large-scale e-commerce enterprises for over 9 years. And a large number of projects gives us the right to say that we know all the major challenges CTOs are struggling with these days and we help solve them in one fell swoop. Overcoming СTOs’ challenges: how does it work?

What pains does Expert Soft take off CTOs’ shoulders?

Recruiting and Filling IT Skills Gap

Shortage of skilled IT engineers is one of the most common CTOs’ challenges. With outsourcing, you’re not limited by your geographical position, hence you get access to a larger talent pool. IT outsourcing gives an opportunity to attract the best talent.

We save CTOs’ time by taking on the responsibility of recruiting, thus they don’t have to waste time on dozens of interviews and can start implementing cutting-edge solutions faster. When our customer needs to quickly scale up a team to take on a new project, we take this challenge off their shoulders and provide them with a team of experienced software developers in a short period of time. Thus, you can build or extend your development team in weeks, not months. And when the project is done, it’s easier for the customer to scale down the number of outsourcing developers than in-house ones.

Establishing the Best Engineering Practices

We dedicate much time and effort to the professional development of employees. Our company has a number of well-established best practices to grow employees, such as individual development plans, performance appraisals, regular salary reviews, training, mentorship programs, meet-ups held by senior engineers, etc. This gives us an opportunity to establish a team of highly professional developers properly skilled for projects of any complexity. Thus, CTOs transfer the risks associated with retaining, growing IT specialists to us. And this way they can focus on their core business tasks.

Besides, we set up work processes in such a way that everyone can do their job more efficiently without wasting time on tasks that could be simplified or automated. We start with choosing a strategy for software architecture design and end with testing, refactoring, conducting code reviews, and setting up continuous integration.

What is more, when it comes to software architecture design, we offer a full architecture decision-making cycle, including analysis of business needs and requirements, conducting discovery phase, and building prototypes ensuring the most suitable architecture for the client.

On-Demand Specialists Training

We discuss with our clients any innovative technologies they’d like to implement. If there is a certain demand, we quickly train our team and master all the additional technologies that are necessary for the implementation of the client’s project.

Establishing Clear and Effective Processes Through Remote Work

Since the start of the pandemic, many companies have had to switch to remote work, which has made it challenging for numerous enterprises to establish effective processes and maintain productivity. Overcoming СTOs’ challenges is easier with us. Being an outsourcing company, we’ve had over 9 years of experience working remotely with our clients. Thus, we know how to make communication transparent and effective. We use different networks to always keep in touch with our customers and inform them of every stage of the project (via Zoom, Skype, Teams, Slack, or any other network convenient for a customer) or make it easy for them to control the project (via Jira, Trello, etc.).

Thus, remote work has never been a problem for us and our customers, many of them understand that remote work is here to stay. So why not embrace it and get unbeatable benefits of having access to a large talent pool in other countries.

Forcing Innovation Smartly

Our company has experience working with disruptive technologies across a wide range of industries. That’s why we can always advise a CTO on a technology stack that would help them drive innovation without harming their business and technical metrics.

Before adopting any groundbreaking technology, we help our customers make a decision not according to “what sounds fancier”, but rather what will bring benefits to them and their enterprises. This helps them avoid additional costs, long delivery time, technical debt, talent shortage, and other challenges associated with choosing unknown technologies.

Avoiding Security Issues

Speaking about security issues, we have effective information security measures in place which comply with international standards, laws, and regulations. Besides, we undertake internal audits and develop thorough information security policies that ensure secure log-on procedures, password management, cryptographic keys management, network security, and information asset management.

We have passed numerous security assessments by our clients, well-known global corporations. After that, we became their technical partners, and our collaboration has been going on for years.

Summing this all up, most of the time customers get to us when:

a legacy system requires modernisation or replacement;
there is too much work for in-house staff;
customers experience a lack of expertise in a given technology or programming language;
there is a need for a highly customised software product adjusted to your individual requirements;
there is a sudden need to introduce a new solution, for example as a result of a legislative change;
they have an IT project that needs to be rescued or a product that needs to enter the market quickly.

What does the process of working with us look like in steps?

Step 1. Negotiation and Contract Procurement

Although it may seem complex, negotiating a contract can be divided into 6 major steps that we clearly describe with our customers. Overcoming СTOs’ challenges starts with defining the scope and nature of the engagement. Then we move towards describing the roles and responsibilities of the client organization. Besides, it’s crucial to define the roles and responsibilities of our company. Moving forward, we define the cost of the engagement and metrics for evaluating the performance of the relationship. The last step is to describe the recourses in case things do not go as expected. There are some other important aspects we take into account when signing a contract:

signing NDA, SA, SOW;
intellectual property rights (for the software that we produce for you);
arrangements for how to make changes to contract terms;
requirements for implementing a recognised practice on information security;
exit strategies for contract termination (transition plans and transfer files);
clear dispute resolution procedures.

Step 2. Implementation

The process of implementation starts with planning and executing service transition. The services are handled over either from the previous IT service provider, or from our customer’s organisation with an aim of achieving operational performance. We make sure service transition is conducted with minimum disruption to our customers.

During the 2nd and 3d weeks of our cooperation, PM and BA start working with Client’s Lead. Then our Tasks Planning Dev Lead is busy with setting up the development environment and transferring knowledge of the process, code review assessment.

The process of transition includes:

knowledge transfer;
determining new governance models;
implementing new governance structures, monitoring and reporting;
implementing new processes;
introducing standard communication channels.

Additionally, our customers implement some periodic check points to be sure that the knowledge transferred has been comprehended and that we fully understand the new contractual agreements.

During the weeks 4-6, 0,5 BA/0,5 PM + 1-2 Developers start Pilot Sprint. They deliver an initial batch of change requests to better know the application.

Stage 3. Managing the Service Delivery

During the weeks 7-10, a dedicated team of PM, BA, 1 Lead/Senior, 2 Mid, 2 Junior+QA starts diving deep into a project. We provide constant stable support with our PM available 24/7 in urgent cases. We make sure the expected levels of operation are being met, and always ready for routine audits on the process.

Stage 4. End of Contract or a New Project

When a contract ends, our customers have 3 options available:

to extend a contract for another period;
to renew a contract;
or terminate a contract.

With most of our partners we have long-term cooperation, which lasts for years. Our contracts are extended or renewed to cover other projects or services (e.g. support and maintenance).

Why is it comfortable for our clients to work with us?

we ensure the highest quality of the code and great performance;
our developers demonstrate deep expertise and advanced engineering and coding skills;
all our engineers have a good command of English;
we’re always available on all social networks (Slack, Zoom, Teams, Skype, etc.) and ready to inform our customers of every step of the project;
our developers do their best to meet all the deadlines, if some challenges arise, we warn our customers in advance and never let them down;
overcoming СTOs’ challenges is possible with us because we’re transparent and honest about all the stages of the project, not hiding any potential unpleasant news or issues;
if you need to fix something in a very short period of time or even after working hours, we’re always there to help.