When high performing teams come together, the results for clients can be ground-breaking. Tiempo recognized this early and that’s why the company has focused on establishing high performing teams as one of the single most important attributes for successful client engagements. Consistently delivering high-performing teams has resulted in delighted clients and Tiempo establishing itself as one of the fastest growing software development companies in the world.
Tiempo Hires for High Performance
When Tiempo recruits and hires people, we don’t select for tools and technologies to the degree that may be common in other software development companies. Newly joining team members understand and support the company’s core values and high-performance team culture. We identify people who will commit to solving clients’ problems creatively and tenaciously.
What enables high-performance development teams to succeed is a clear, complete view of a client’s business priorities expressed in terms of planned and prioritized product capabilities. Tiempo treats agile and thorough planning as complementary, not contradictory. The more conscientiously you plan and define your outcomes, the more confidently you can unleash the genius of your agile development teams. Planning by business analysts and product managers gives them the freedom and direction to excel creatively. It also gives us and our clients the flexibility to make course corrections without risking our documented project goals.
In high-performance team environments, accountability does not flow hierarchically. Instead, contributors in all positions are at the centers of their nodes of accountability. Practically, in the day-to-day functioning of Tiempo’s high- performance teams, the product managers, business analysts SCRUM masters, engineers, architects and testers are accountable to each other.
The Capability Engine Drives Ultimate Outcomes
For Tiempo Development clients, the urgency of delivering value quickly can be very high. We rely on a set of decisions and assessments that are collectively known as the Tiempo Capability Engine. The Capability Engine starts moving during the earliest conversations with a client, when discovery to identify project requirements is still underway. It enables us to be fully productive as soon as a client greenlights a nearshore development effort.
Business development associates create a detailed configurator matrix when they perform their fact-finding with a client. This includes a list of the client’s business requirements, technologies, and development resources; the developer skills and technology tools Tiempo will provide; and specific conditions for the client’s network and computing environment.
A Client’s Outstanding Outcome
CBT Nuggets, a leading provider of on- demand, online IT learning, engaged with Tiempo when it was time to transition from a .NET-based, monolithic environment to a microservices architecture. Tiempo created a high-performance team to support the initiative and replicated CBT Nuggets’ structure of front-end and back-end developer teams in one of its development centers. Sean Sullivan, the CTO, says, “Tiempo took very little time to identify and recruit skilled individuals who technically and professionally were a great match for us. The skills of our internal teams grew when they observed Tiempo’s approach to agile. We were highly impressed with the level of detail in their user stories and their meticulous preparation and planning.”
“Our director of software development from Tiempo aligned the talent with what the product needed to be and then gave the team the freedom to work autonomously toward that objective,” says Sullivan.
“Clearly, Tiempo has a very mature practice of identifying the right resources to participate in high-performance teams and managing them to achieve the outcomes clients seek.”
Sean Sullivan – CTO of CBT Nuggets
In its collaboration with Tiempo, CBT Nuggets was often impressed with the emphasis of high performing teams and the unwavering orientation of developers toward optimal outcomes. Sullivan comments, “Some software engineers simply like to write code and not think too much about its purpose – Tiempo developers’ focus is always on creating a software product that delivers tangible value to its users.”
Activating its capability engine, Tiempo suffered no constraints when it needed to bring DevOps specialists to its high-performance teams. “Tiempo served as a catalyst for our collaborative DevOps initiative by adding several highly talented individuals to their CBT Nuggets team in Guadalajara,” Sullivan describes. “These contributors were extremely responsive to our concerns, including the health of our development infrastructure. They are on call just like our own team members are and take full ownership of their roles and assignments.”
