How Companies Can Transfer Critical Knowledge Before an Augmented Technology Team Exits

One of the most effective ways to increase your software delivery speed and bring specialist skill sets in is through using an IT Staff Augmentation model. Bringing in external engineers, cloud architects, and data experts will allow your teams to be fully empowered with new people in the pods to code, integrate and meet your key delivery dates.

However, when your project is coming to an end and contracts finish, you may experience some issues.

If there isn’t a system in place to share knowledge between your augmented team and you, your company will lose valuable insights. As there won’t be any documentation, complex architecture decisions and configuration will be lost, along with any workarounds for bugs. This creates major issues with your internal teams, who will struggle to maintain/develop software they haven’t created. Corporate leaders need to create a habit around knowledge transfer from the start of projects.

Starting Knowledge Sharing from the Onboarding Phase

The biggest mistake many companies make is leaving knowledge transfer until the last minute. Within the final week of your contract, you won’t be able to ask your external team to share months of complex decisions. This will result in missing key points, poor documentation and overwhelm for your internal developers.

A great way to begin creating a knowledge management process is by:

• Pairing your augmented specialist with an internal developer on key features from the start of the sprint.
• Ensure all pull requests from your external developers have been peer-reviewed by your internal developers.
• Include your augmented resource in your internal daily standups, sprints and retros.

This enables a natural knowledge transfer to happen throughout your organisation.

Enforcing Live System and API Documentation Standards

As your external software engineers will be under tight deadlines, they will often forget to document properly. Whilst this will increase your speed, it will leave a large amount of technical debt for your permanent team.

Enterprise leaders can ensure documentation is a ‘must-have’ by:

• Enforce clear documentation by requiring your external developers to add comments to their code and create API documentation.
• Create a documentation hub for all architecture designs, database diagrams and integrations.
• Create detailed runbooks for your systems.

By having a strict documentation process in place, your internal team will be able to manage, troubleshoot and scale your technology independently.

Implementing Reverse-Shadowing and Hands-On Validation

Typically knowledge transfers are done with your departing contractor providing a slide deck or short video of their complex code. This can create a false sense of security. Whilst your engineers may feel they understand the system, they may struggle when they try to troubleshoot an issue in production.

A much better option is reverse shadowing. This involves swapping roles during your final weeks of offboarding:

• Internal Developers take full control of developing features, deploying and fixing bugs.
• Your external augmented contractors move into a mentoring role.
• Have your internal team carry out a mock disaster recovery/configuration change whilst your external team are still available to answer questions.

This shows your permanent employees can indeed run your software independently.

Structuring Offboarding Off-Ramps and Advisory Retainers

You don’t have to remove your external technical experts completely. Removing your whole team in one go on a Friday afternoon will cause gaps in your operation. If you have any unexpected bugs in production soon after a major release, you may struggle.

Enterprise leaders can create a gradual offboarding process:

• Reduce your external team gradually. For example remove your developers first but leave your lead architect for a few additional weeks.
• Leave some of your augmented specialists as micro mentors. This means they can be on call for a few hours per month after project completion.
• Carry out a thorough offboarding audit with your team leads to ensure all admin access, repo access and credentials have been handed back to your internal IT.

This creates a safety net for your internal team to gain confidence.

Building an Internal Culture of Knowledge Ownership

No matter how good your knowledge transfer tools/documentation are, if your internal developers don’t feel a sense of ownership, they won’t use them. If your employees think the 3rd party contractors are solely responsible for the outcome of the system, they will not want to learn about the architecture.

Leaders should create a culture of ownership:

• Define an internal owner: Ensure each module/microservice created by your augmented team has an internal developer assigned as the owner.
• Have internal tech talks: Have your permanent employees educate the rest of the organisation about new technologies they’ve integrated.
• Celebrate the maintenance work: Ensure your permanent employees are valued for the work they do to maintain and optimise your software.

When your permanent team feel ownership over the incoming technologies, they’ll be eager to learn, ask questions and take on board knowledge.

Partner with AIQUSearch to Achieve Business Development and Manage Scaling

By partnering with IT staffing experts like AIQUSearch, your enterprise will be able to manage growth effectively. Instead of wasting your resources on slow and unpredictable hiring processes, you’ll have direct access to our network of pre-vetted tech experts. We’ll work with your technology roadmap to provide you with the engineering expertise you need at the right time. Whether you’re scaling your team up for a big software launch or adjusting your workforce to save your budget, we’ll source, test and manage the complex compliance. This keeps your digital projects on track and means you can focus on your business development.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why is knowledge transfer important when using IT staff augmentation?

Your augmented developers will be creating core code and integrations. If you don’t have a knowledge transfer process in place your internal team won’t be able to maintain, troubleshoot or update the complex software.

2. When should knowledge transfer start?

Knowledge transfer should start from day one. Pair your augmented specialist with your internal developers, ensure code reviews are happening and enforce live documentation throughout your project. This will prevent panic when your contract comes to an end.

3. What is reverse shadowing?

Reverse shadowing is a technique where your internal developers will be actively running, deploying and fixing code, whilst your departing external contractors will be mentoring and validating.

4. How can I ensure my external developers document their code?

Ensure they have clear inline documentation, API documentation and runbooks as part of their acceptance criteria.

5. What if I have a critical bug after my augmented team has left?

By creating a gradual offboarding process or having micro-mentoring on call with your staffing partner, you’ll have access to your key external experts to help your internal team.