One of the main pain points of early-stage startup founders is filling all the positions with the skill sets required for their workplan.
There are two alternatives for empowering the team with a specific skill:
(1) Hiring Employees
(2) Engaging with Consultants (Professional Services companies)
So why is it so painful if there are two alternatives?
Let’s start with ‘hiring an employee’ – Due to the shortage of a qualified workforce in the Israeli market, recruiting a qualified employee could take several months. Also, for the same reason, the employee’s monthly salary is extremely high.
In some cases, the salary expectations of the candidates are so high that an early-stage startup will not be able to meet it, and basically, the “employee option” is struck off the list.
So what if hiring an employee on payroll isn’t always available to early-stage startups’ founders? They can always engage with a professional services provider and get the skills their team needs, right? Well, not really.
The problem is that professional services companies are known for their extremely low responsiveness and limited availability. This poor service level is inherently present in their business model: Maximizing revenue by engaging with maximum number of customers while overloading employees to optimize profitability.
This pain point is the reason for IAMOPS’ existence.
IAMOPS designs a new concept of DevOps workforce to help early-stage startups thrive
We understand that addressing this pain requires designing a new concept of the workforce.
The first question which we think is worth asking – what are the attributes that make an “optimal workforce” in the eyes of an average manager?
Here are the attributes we think must be prioritized:
- Fast onboarding
- Flexibility in scope
- Responsiveness
- Availability
- Professionalism
- Ability to quickly learn and understand concepts
- Thoroughness
- Ability to work independently (do not requires micro-management)
- Proactiveness
Filtering this list into a top 5, top 3, or THE SINGLE MOST crucial attribute is an extremely difficult task.
What is your opinion on this? Let us know in this SURVEY.
What is your opinion on this? Let us know in this SURVEY.
Understanding the importance of each attribute and how it impacts a manager’s decision-making process
Since currently I do not hold any quantitative data that enable me to argue which attributes are more important to managers than others, I am using a different approach to understand the weight of each attribute in the decision-making process of the average manager.
Due to the nature of the engagement models, the attributes mentioned above can be classified in the following manner
- Employees surpass Consultants in the following attributes:
- Responsiveness
- Availability
- Consultants surpass employees in the following attributes:
- Fast onboarding
- Flexible scope
- The rest of the attributes cannot be associated with a specific engagement model and essentially depend on the nature of the person who is doing the job. These attributes include:
- Professional Knowledge
- Ability to quickly learn and understand concepts
- Thoroughness
- Ability to work independently (do not require micro-management)
- Proactiveness
Considering the classifications of attributes above, here’s a typical scenario:
When the scope of workload becomes significant, and the cost of engaging with consultant are starting to get close to the cost of hiring an employee on payroll, the tech team leader will prefer to recruit an employee rather than engaging with a professional services provider.
In other words, whenever there is a significant scope of workload in a specific domain, and the manager has the patience to wait for 2-6 months for the recruitment process, employees on payroll will be the preferred choice of the average manager.
That may imply that a high level of responsiveness and availability embodies higher value than fast onboarding and flexibility in scope.
- Responsiveness
- Availability
- Fast onboarding
- Flexible scope
- Professional Knowledge
- Ability to quickly learn and understand concepts
- Thoroughness
- Ability to work independently (do not require micro-management)
- Proactiveness
The value of the responsiveness and availability of a workforce in the growth of early-stage startups
So why are responsiveness and availability so valuable to the average manager that they are willing to work so hard on recruiting an employee rather than engaging quickly, that too in flexible scope with a professional services provider?
The main reason for that preference is that responsiveness and availability eventually mean that the workforce is fully dedicated to the company’s workplan. The outcomes are:
- Ease of management
- Commitment to the team objective
Now, we can basically describe the obvious in clear terms: Founders of early-stage startups compromise on responsiveness and availability and engage with service providers. But they do it only till they realize that it will be worthy of their cost and time to recruit an employee on the payroll, which is not only easier to manage but also committed to the company’s workplan.
However, when they hire an employee, they compromise on other attributes such as flexibility, recruiting costs and more.
Based on the above, we understand that we need to develop a new type of workforce that:
a. has the attributes of the employee;
b. but is flexible and can be onboarded fast
In other words, our mission is to develop an optimal DevOps workforce framework that will guarantee:
- Responsiveness – as an employee on payroll.
- Availability – as an employee on payroll.
- Fast onboarding – as a service provider.
- Flexibility – as a service provider.
Professionalism
With this new DevOps workforce framework, early-stage startup founders never have to compromise one attribute over the others.
b. but is flexible and can be onboarded fast