How we scaled our own delivery at Distributed with Elastic Teams

By: Charles Lindon

As Chief Delivery Officer at Distributed, I have the honour of leading a team that’s directly impacting how enterprises plan and execute on their digital transformation projects during a time of tech talent shortage. Every day, we get to learn about our customers’ needs and help them embrace enterprise-level delivery that’s powered by the Distributed Talent Cloud. I’m proud to say that we serve as an example of our own Talent Delivery model by incorporating Elastic Teams into how we scale projects internally at Distributed. 

After bringing Talent Cloud to our clients across a diverse set of industries, we wanted to apply our own methodology internally. Integrating Elastic Teammates into our Delivery function has yielded more flexibility, productivity, and agility to meet our changing needs. We are able to scale the team quickly, with pre-vetted talent to deal with peaks in client demand. Learn more about our journey to see how Elastic Teams became integral to our own scale-up goals. For leaders who are setting out on their journey with Talent Cloud, I hope our story can be a foundational roadmap that you can apply to your own teams.

Identifying the need

I’ve seen first-hand how leveraging Elastic Teams has been instrumental in scaling delivery on client projects year over year. We had the opportunity to integrate Elastic Teammates into our own Delivery function earlier this year when we identified a need for additional talent. With a core team member entering maternity leave and a number of client projects increasing in demand, there was a talent gap we needed to bridge. Additionally, we offer core team members the opportunity to progress and evolve their careers, so when a teammate expressed interest in pursuing a new area of growth with another function of the organisation, we encouraged the journey wholeheartedly. We often see these changes reflected in our own clients’ teams:

• Planned (or unplanned) leaves of absence

• Employee professional growth leading to team shifts

• Increase in business resulting in a need for more support

• Internal projects that require specialised expertise

Instead of setting out to hire for full-time replacements in these instances, we decided to tap into our own Elastic Team community. We’ve built a hugely talented core team. However, having strengthened our onboarding processes, we realised permanent hires weren’t always necessary to meet fluctuating business demands. With more powerful delivery workflows and streamlined processes, we’re able to get new teammates quickly up to speed on projects. This intentional work that we’ve done to prepare our organisation for collaborating with freelance talent is especially evident when we see Elastic Teammates smoothly integrating into projects and picking up on tasks without any major slowdowns.

Getting the right talent onboarded

It wasn’t difficult finding the right talent to meet our needs. As an organisation that has built an entire talent delivery model around identifying the best talent and getting experts started on projects quickly, we already had a deep understanding of the skill sets that we needed on our team. We knew we needed to find Elastic Teammates with project management acumen who were adaptable and experts with product management experience.

Within three days, we had multiple Elastic Team members ramping up with our Delivery team. Instead of launching a search for full-time replacements or even starting from scratch to find new freelancers, having the Elastic Team community available to us made the process all that much easier and faster. Having worked with these Elastic Team members before on client projects, we already knew going into the engagements that they come with proven track records.

Delivering with seamless productivity

In my experience, seasoned freelancers make invaluable additions, as their career resilience equips them with versatile and transferable skill sets paired with self-direction—a perfect combination for tackling complex client assignments. Their motivation for stimulating work and eagerness to demonstrate value also enables rapid onboarding cycles.

Over the past quarter, we’ve really enjoyed working with people that we knew would take a level of ownership and responsibility that historically leaders always assume they can only find in full-time employees. In this day and age with so many new ways of working and collaborating, that simply is no longer true. We see Elastic Team members stepping into projects with confidence and picking up on communication seamlessly.

Sammie, an Elastic Teammate who joined the Delivery team at the top of the quarter as a Project Management Office (PMO) Analyst, has smoothly integrated into our existing workflows and projects. Of the experience so far, she shares: “Distributed looks after both Elastic Teammates and core staff in a way that I haven’t experienced in my career before. The way they immediately focussed on 1-on-1 training, to ensure that I was able to hit the ground running in terms of how the business works, felt very personal to me and has enabled me to get up to speed very quickly.

I’ve had a very varied career with a lot of experience in freelancing, and this journey with Distributed has been unique. To come on board to a startup, with their own ways of doing things, I would have expected it to be more challenging, but because of my incredibly supportive team, this has never been an issue. Further to this, my voice is actively encouraged to have as much input and gravitas as anyone within the company.”

Looking to the future

At Distributed, we view engaging our Elastic Talent community as building long-term relationships, not one-off gigs. Our unparalleled support systems inspire commitment within our agile community. Elastic Team members feel invested in our mission and team because we invest in their holistic development. This is also true when Elastic Teams are deployed to work on client projects; they become trusted partners to the internal teams.

Delivering projects with Talent Cloud is an essential strategy for the future. The tailored, highly motivated talent required to drive innovation will come from elastic models, not legacy structures obsessed with utilisation over solutions. Here at Distributed, we’ll continue blending exceptional full-time and freelance experts to better serve our clients.