Running a Project with a Mix of Third-Party and Internal Resources

Even with a robust engineering team, it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with development deadlines as product deliverables and support requirements are constantly evolving. The smaller your team, the more pressure is on to deliver. This is why many organizations run their projects with a mix of internal teams and third-party subject matter experts.    

Top Reasons for Third-Party Partnerships

Assess the needs below to determine if partnering with an external team can accelerate, optimize, or improve the quality of your project.  

Timeline

The faster companies can meet evolving organization and customer needs, the quicker they can bring new products and services into production. Augmenting internal teams with our domain expertise can help deliver projects with accelerated timelines to drive customer satisfaction.

Market Conditions

By taking a data-driven approach to analyzing how their products and services compare in the market, an organization can identify how important it is to develop a competitive solution or accelerate a differentiating or disruptive product. Partnering with external domain experts can bring a fresh viewpoint to a project and help you take advantage of market conditions to expand and retain customers.

Augment Teams with Highly Specialized Partners  

Domain-authoritative third-party partnerships enable your organization to avoid falling behind on your development deadlines. If your team is strong but can use the experience someone with decades in the field can deliver, specialized partners  can lend their knowledge quickly.  

Unbiased Perspective

It’s difficult for anyone -  leadership teams, project managers, and domain professionals alike - to anticipate all conditions and potential outcomes when closely focused on a project. With Mavsotech equally invested in your success but bringing outside perspective and clarity, we partner with our clients for long-term success. Our partnership will bring additional industry viewpoints, trends and technologies to your organization enabling a new (or additional)  perspective to your projects.  

Curating a Successful Collaboration Model

The most successful collaborations operate with transparency and timely communication. Without both, there can be insufficient autonomy, and the quality of the project may suffer. There is also less likelihood that blind spots in the project timeline, features, and/or functions will be uncovered prior to deployment.  Mavsotech specializes in building successful collaboration models with our partners.

Use the tips below to curate a successful collaboration model.

Analyze Your Internal Resources

Mine your data and analytics to ensure your market research, local area data, demographic data, and other data points are current. As you know, things change quickly, and customer expectations are constantly evolving; identifying internal and external shifts as soon as possible is key.  

Define Your Needs

Utilize Mavsotech to bring your internal and external teams together to brainstorm on innovative solutions that include:

Objectives—what pain points need to be resolved, what internal KPIs need to be delivered, and more.  

Project Drivers – consider the drivers for the project including allocating a part of the project to a third party partner, enabling a parallel development path (not impacting the current organization), enabling your team to pursue new product initiatives while our team provides maintenance and support of current products, or explore a new market/product capability that enables the organization to gain a foothold in a new market.

Timeline—Examine the timeline for the development phase detailing out each component either through a handoff process to a 3^rd party or via compiling estimates from ideation to architecture, through development, and throughout the support phases.  

Skill and team needs—determine the needed domain expertise and skill gaps .  

• Assign a Project Manager: If you haven’t yet, assign a project manager. Larger organizations often designate an internal PM. If your team is small, you may use one of our PMs. Also, designate an agile framework to map out strategic and agile project management.  
• Introduction: Facilitate project onboarding sessions to introduce your subject matter experts to the organization’s brand, the product management and development teams. Then, dive into the scope and specifications and timeline requirements of the project.  
• Collaborate: Leave space for collaboration, allowing internal and external teams to bring their industry insights to the table.  
• Map Out: Map out your project, designate tasks, and assign a timeline for each week or month of development.  
• Communicate: Check-in with each team member and share daily progress reports. If not daily, several times per week to keep the lines of communication open.
• Test: Build a robust unit test process. Then instill robust quality assurance to beta testing processes focused on providing a comprehensive Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Ensure your test plans drive recursive ongoing progress.  
• Refine: Once testing is complete, share the results with both teams to brainstorm what needs to be refined and what meets the goals of the working phase of the project.  
• Evolve: Technology is constantly evolving, so many projects are ongoing. Once each phase is complete, compile user feedback and revisit data and analytics to determine next-generation functionality or new product development needs.  

Ready to Get Started?

Mavsotech specializes in ideation, designing, developing, and deploying proprietary software and hardware solutions for:

• Video and broadband service providers
• Audio automotive technology

• Ad insertion technology    
• Connected entertainment

Mavsotech provides trusted solutions and services that help customers drive success in the digital entertainment marketplace. To speak with a team member with expertise managing internal and third party resources, please contact us at info@mavsotech.com.

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