The Challenge
InspireLabs is a digital marketing company that specializes in harnessing emerging digital advertising technologies for the e-commerce industry. They are a dynamic organisation that regulary innovates and prototypes new adtech innovations before establishing them as stand-alone products and solutions.
The organisation required a dynamic software development team that could adapt itself to several different projects, all at different stages and with different technical and functional requirements. InspireLabs had attempted in the past to establish a sustainable software delivery team however had frequently run into challenges with retention and keeping knowledge within the team. This placed additional strain on management, who were spending more time recruiting and facilitating knowledge transfer than they were on their core business.
The Solution
The organisation approached InspireX with the need to establish an initial team of 3 developers. InspireX worked closely with their managers to understand the technical requirements for each team member. Our management actively participated in the skills identification process by leveraging its own technical knowledge as well as a deep understanding of the Cebu software industry. Once established, the dedicated team of recruiters went to market to source candidates. The candidates were vetted through the administering of a technical test and an initial interview to assess both cultural and technical fit. With the first candidate, the client chose to interview the candidate themselves, however having obtained confidence in the hiring process, the client entrusted the remaining hires to the recruitment specialists.
Once the team was appointed, a comprehensive operational and cultural onboarding process was undertaken in conjunction with the client. An InspireX Technical Delivery Manager was appointed to work alongside the team and the client for the first 3 months to establish and enshine ways-of-working which included agile rituals, documentation standards and communication paths. This proved instrumental in establishing a detailed knowledge repository to reduce the impact of a staff member being unavailable or leaving the team.
Team culture was also established as a subset of the wider InspireX culture which stems from its core virtues. Regular staff engagement in the form of a monthly 1-1 coaching session with each team member was put in place to understand the employees challenges, goals and morale. Lifelong learning plans were also developed based on the needs of the staff member and the client and courses such as AWS certifications were established to ensure the staff member was consistently challenged and up to date with current technologies.
Early during the engagement, it was noted by the team that the workflow could be improved through a dedicate QA resource. The client was approached with this recommendation and soon after a QA was incorporated into the team along with two new software developers as a result of business growth.
The Outcome
Since the establishment of a team with InspireX using sustainable HR and people management methodoliges, the team has experienced an attrition rate of 14% over the last 2 years (with one employee exiting the team) which is well below the 2021 attrition rate of 57.3%.
Knowledge has stayed within the team and as a result, projects are stood up and executed faster enabling the client to run more prototypes and establish more products and services. Both the client team and the InspireX team have developed high trust relationships between Philippines, US and Australia and work as a single cohesive unit with little to distinguish between the two.
The clients feedback is below:
“We’re a fast paced and highly technical business. The impact of spending time having to recruit new staff, manage all the back office functions like payroll and HR simply detract from what we do best, which is adtech. Partnering with InspireX has given us the ability to do just that. They have built a great team for us that is critical to our success and continue to engage with us as a business partner rather than just a supplier of resource.”
Like to find out more about how InspireX builds great teams? Book a meeting with an InspireX representative for an overview of our customer onboarding process.
