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To Their Own Devices… the Keys to a Great Tech Team in Your Company

Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

The tech team is the engine room of your organization. Whatever industry you are operating in, whether it is the health industry or marketing, technology is always the crucial component that underpins it all. When we are considering what our engine room should look like, we must recognize that the tech team is partly to do with the right tools, but also the right talent. With this in mind, what are some of the things you should do to make sure you have a top-tier tech team at every turn?

Understanding the Right Technology

The right tools should underpin what your organization is trying to achieve, but it may be necessary to do it within a strict budget. Small businesses can benefit from having a variety of tools, but it’s about making sure that the right ones stick and help people do their work. Small businesses can benefit from purchasing cheaper technology. And you can easily get HP refurbished components like memory modules and hard drives so you can build your own tools. 

This is something that many organizations may find an ineffective approach because of the time it takes, however, you have the luxury of time if you are just setting up an organization so you can spend a bit more time finding the right people who are not just able to use the tools, but actually have that rare technical mindset. If you opted for machinery that you can build on-site, this can be a great solution that you can use to your advantage. 

Should You Outsource? 

Outsourcing in comparison to in-house teams poses a lot of questions. Small startups may begin with outsourcing and the more successful business becomes means you may decide to switch your outsourced team to an in-house one. We should be looking to bring as much of the tech team in-house as possible, but outsourcing is a fantastic temporary solution. When you outsource, you are able to get your product to market quickly and it can help with some of the early challenges, such as budgetary restraints or even a lack of technical skills. 

When you opt for a fully outsourced team, you’ve got to consider the time it takes to school up these people, not just in terms of the technicalities but also in terms of the bigger picture your business is helping to achieve. It may prove beneficial to go for an in-house team right away, however, many businesses don’t have the budget to achieve this. Choose wisely. 

Aligning Skill Development With Business Outcomes

When you have a team in-house, one of the benefits of this setup is that you can point them toward the big picture. They need to know the way. And when you have a team on the same page relating to a specific project, this is going to create better support so you can get the desired results. It’s critical for businesses to showcase their objectives clearly at the outset, and as far as cultural fits are concerned, when you align the development of skills with what you are hoping to achieve, you may find that this is a far more effective setup. 

You are empowering the team to do better work because they have an inherent understanding of what the business needs. But this is nothing if you don’t have a set of core values and objectives. 

Identifying Individual Needs

You must ensure that your team has the skills now, but also the skills in the future, which is a very different thing indeed. It can be very easy in organizations to leave a tech team to its own devices. But rather than them being the Santa’s Elves of your organization, you must understand what it takes to give your team the skills to thrive over the years. You can do this by trying out a pilot program. Pilot programs are very useful because they are giving the operation a sneak preview of what could be achieved with the specific initiative. 

When you pilot initiatives within your business, it has lower steaks and will give you more confidence in whether that initiative has wings. When you craft a pilot program, you can then start to focus on specific skills within the program and understand that a tech team is not just going to benefit from learning within that specific pool. For example, you can start to diversify their skill sets. You can bring members of staff into other departments and have a skills swap session, or you can have people spend a day shadowing other members of the team, which doesn’t just give them insight into different skills within the organization, but also gives them a better view of the big picture. 

Small businesses can easily seem more fragmented in this day and age because of remote working. When you start to identify individual skills and what they need to progress within the organization, it can make for a better working culture because it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Prioritizing Cultural Fit 

The culture is critical because any team can have the basic knowledge, but if you want them to develop they need to buy into the overall ethos of what the business is doing and they should want to be part of the process. It can be tough to find the right person who ticks all of these boxes, but this is why we have to prioritize and craft a great onboarding process that looks for individuals with the cultural fit. This can be tougher, especially as businesses can focus on individual skills as a way to keep the entire business afloat. 

When you start to think about building up this big picture, especially when your tech team is just one component, you can realize there are many ways to bring it to fruition. As you grow your business, you need to pay close attention to individuals who will understand the vision, but this means they also need to be a solid fit in a cultural sense.

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