Growing an engineering team without hiring

Project

Anadea develops SaaS, web and mobile applications for many clients from different fields and the range of company developers’ skills and proficiency levels is very broad. As a company interested in the professional growth of its employees, Anadea approached mkdev with a request for training. During initial calls, Anadea and mkdev figured that one-size-fits-all solutions won’t be suitable and decided to try a more personalised approach.

Challenge

When we discussed the project with Anadea, we realised that they were trying to find the right balance between the interests of customers and the interests of their own employees. Both lead to Anadea’s prosperity, and to privilege one over the other is to incur losses.

The challenge to mkdev was therefore to come up with a training solution that would educate the employees without distracting them from their work for Anadea’s clients.

Solution

At mkdev, we have practiced a personalised, relationship-based approach to learning with a mentor since our inception. Although this approach has certain organisational shortcomings (precisely because of the interpersonal relationships involved), no other form of training can match it in effectiveness, engagement and impact. Therefore, using the help of a mentor in this case was the right decision.

We launched a new learning processes within Anadea with a small group of React developers who were at the time working on the SaaS platform for one of the company’s most respected clients. mkdev brought in our React expert who has extensive experience in one-to-one mentoring and introduced him to the Anadea development team.

And this is where the interpersonal relationship, and the mentor’s ability to get it right, is important. Together with Anadea, we had taken all measures to temporarily «embed» the mentor in the company’s internal processes to monitor the quality, speed and effectiveness of the mentee’s work and training. Another important part was building a trusting relationship between our expert, Al Geas, and Anadea developers.

Together with the developers, Al worked out a schedule of communication, code-reviews and calls so that it was efficient, did not harm the work process and did not overburden the developers in their spare time. Although we didn’t achieve the desired effect on the first try, eventually, thanks to human relations, all participants successfully found a balance and built effective work.

While the mentor was completely involved in the development process, he didn’t write code himself. Instead he was focused more on thorough code-reviews, and thus remained an overseer and commentator of all the processes taking place inside the project team. And thanks to that he could see who was doing what, what mistakes were being made, and what was causing those mistakes. This allowed Al to effectively influence the quality of work of all the developers involved and, at the same time, increase their professionalism.

This is exactly what this development team needed at this stage. They have improved their skills while staying focused on the client’s projects, being able to complete it to an even higher standard, on time, and not involving other developers to solve the difficulties that arise, which has ultimately increased the overall efficiency and productivity of multiple developers in the company.

Conclusion

It gives us great pleasure to know that our once-preferred approach to training, based on interpersonal relationships, is paying off, even at the scale of large companies. And it is even more gratifying that more and more companies are thinking about investing in their developers. Anadea has been able to appreciate the positive impact of training programmers on the efficiency of the overall development process, and that adding human relationships to a business makes it better.

You too are probably thinking about helping your team become even better experts at what they do. And we can help you do just that. Give us a call and we'll discuss it!