Tap skilled IT engineers without adding headcount

The growth and evolution of technology has reshaped the global marketplace, and organizations that want to stay competitive, must embrace digital transformation. But keeping pace with the rate of innovation—and obtaining the technical capabilities your organization needs—can be challenging. In this article, I’ll explore three ways to tap the expertise of highly skilled IT engineers without adding headcount. For more information, be sure to read What’s the right fit: Professional services, managed services, or staff augmentation?

If you need to add a special skillset: professional services

Professional or consulting services are ideal for when you need licensed or certified IT engineers or other technology experts with hard-to-find skillsets for projects such as data migrations or setting up a DevOps practice. With a global network of highly specialized engineers and IT professionals, Beyondsoft has helped countless enterprise customers tackle complex projects and solve business challenges.

A great example is the work we did for Tokio Marine. This specialty insurance group wanted to leverage AWS technology and implement DevOps for two of its business-critical, customer-facing applications. But they didn’t have the in-house capacity to handle this kind of work. So they tapped Beyondsoft professional services to complete the project.

Within just five months, our DevOps and AWS engineers and professionals had migrated both applications to agile, AWS technology and had established an automated DevOps framework, delivering increased product quality, accelerated product delivery, and greater operational efficiency.

Read the full case study: Insurance group leverages DevOps framework & AWS to up-level application quality

If you need to offload specialized services to qualified experts: managed services

Managed services can be the ideal option when you need ongoing support from qualified professionals. Managed services can free up your staff to focus on core business priorities while ensuring ongoing management of IT systems and processes can be completed by qualified professionals and skilled IT engineers.

Beyondsoft currently partners with one of the world’s leading technology companies to provide highly specialized managed services. With more than 200 data centers, our customer wanted to integrate autonomous device technologies to help their centralized team manage the distributed infrastructures more efficiently. The autonomous navigation and sensing platforms are designed to perform routine tasks such as enabling remote equipment inspections, monitoring for safety hazards, and tracking site conditions.

To keep their own engineers focused on core responsibilities, they partnered with Beyondsoft to manage their autonomous device program in three key areas: deployment and ongoing support, quality assurance and testing, and design and development. Offloading this highly specialized, ongoing work to Beyondsoft enabled our customer to deploy their autonomous device program rapidly and cost effectively, innovate faster, and expand their team’s agility and productivity.

Read the full case study: Beyondsoft accelerates autonomous device industry, amplifying growth & agility for technology giant

If you need to scale quickly or accelerate time to market: staff augmentation

Sometimes you just need to add IT engineering capacity to manage workload fluctuations or to expedite projects. That’s where staff augmentation comes in handy. Staff augmentation enables organizations to rapidly resolve a talent shortage while ensuring you fill gaps with the right skills. Staff augmentation can also be helpful if you need to expand support in a different time zone, which means having a global partner like Beyondsoft with more than 20,000 professionals in worldwide delivery centers can be a major benefit.

Here’s what to look for in an IT engineering services partner

So, what are the qualities to look for when choosing an IT engineering partner?

Global capacity

Look for partner with worldwide delivery centers and a large workforce with extensive skillsets. Having support from skilled IT engineers in multiple time zones and languages provides greater flexibility. And depending upon location, it can even be an economical choice.

History of delivery

Choose a partner with a long history of delivering exemplary IT engineering services. Ask potential partners for case studies and examples of how they work with organizations.

Broad range of services

As your technology needs evolve, so will your need for services. Choose a partner that can provide managed services, professional services, and staff augmentation. Additionally, ensure they have deep expertise in areas such as cloud, DevOps, intelligent analytics, big data, and migrations.

Partnerships with key technology providers

Ensure your IT engineering provider has invested in partnerships with key technology providers such as AWS and Microsoft. Achieving partnerships with these providers demonstrates expertise and experience.

Tap skilled IT engineers at Beyondsoft

As a global IT services partner, Beyondsoft has more than 20,000 skilled IT engineers and other professionals. We offer flexible staffing with onshore, offshore, and mixed-shore options as well as an array of managed services and consulting and strategy in areas such as migration, cloud services, applied analytics, and DevOps. We’ve cultivated partnerships with some of the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft, AWS, Vertica, and Adobe.

To learn more about how we can help your team tap IT engineering expertise, contact us or explore the Beyondsoft website. To understand our approach to cultivating a talented global workforce, download Growing Global Teams: A Best-Practice Approach to Organizational Design.

Do yourself a favor: audit before you automate

Organizations that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate manual processes stand to realize benefits such as increased efficiency, productivity, and profitability and reduce exposure to human-caused mistakes. But often, organizations jump onto the automation bandwagon without fully understanding what they’re trying to automate and what’s involved. The results can be expensive and lead to failure and disappointment. In this article, I want to explore the reasons why you should conduct an audit before you automate.

Know what you trying to automate and why

While this statement may seem obvious, we often find that the answer is far more convoluted than organizations realize. On the surface, you likely know what needs to happen. But when you look under the hood, things get more complex and multiple questions must be addressed, such as:

  • How does the solution meet the business’s pain points and current and future needs?
  • What are the expected outcomes?
  • Is required data available and if so, what is the format and quality?
  • What system integrations are required?
  • What is the development effort?
  • What are the required technical skillsets?
  • What out-of-the box solutions are available?
  • Can the existing architecture support the new automated system?
  • What is the return on investment?

Digging in and answering these and other questions can help you expose complexities and assess the full scope of what you’re wanting to automate.

Establish clear KPIs

Once you understand the goals of your automation project, make sure you have a way to track against those goals by establishing a clear set of KPIs. Defining KPIs can help keep progress and scope on track, align stakeholders around expectations, and quantifies the projects success.

Automation KPIs might include:

  • Implementation time and costs
  • Time or money saved by the automation
  • Increased productivity
  • Increased efficiency
  • Improved quality, accuracy, and/or compliance
  • Increased employee satisfaction

How an automation audit helped a major software company save time and money

We recently worked with a major software company that relies on multiple third-party, customer service vendors to manage customer support issues. At the time, 20-30 people manually monitored just 20-30% of the agents’ work. Our customer wanted a comprehensive, automated tool to monitor all the agents with fewer people.

Before diving into the project, Beyondsoft first conducted an automation audit, to answer the questions listed above as well as many others. The audit uncovered many complexities that we knew we needed to address. For example, our customer wanted to monitor information in near real time. However, we determined that there was no data available, necessitating the creation of a new real-time API.

Then there were the integrations. Our customer wanted visibility into issues originally posted on social media. But upon closer examination, we found that the effort to accurately analyze the data (e.g., determining if there is an issue or if a customer is airing past grievances) could not, at the time, simply be handled by AI and ML.

We not only looked at the customer’s pain points, we identified and analyzed multiple data sources. We explored the technical framework, including the tools and services required, the necessary integrations, workflows that would need to be created, and the essential skillsets needed. From there, we put together a proof of concept to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of the chosen solution. Then we estimated the costs and implementation timeframe and determined a clear set of KPIs to help keep the project on track and ensure the outcome would meet customer expectations.

In the end, by taking the time to conduct an automation audit and ensuring the customer had a clear understanding of the solution they were after, we were able to deliver a solution for monitoring 100% of the third-party agents with just half the staff previously required.

If you are looking to automate, contact Beyondsoft to schedule an automation audit. For additional insights, check out Considerations for designing a test automation strategy and Say hello to productivity with intelligent automation