How Shift Ahead Reduced Engineering Costs by 55%

Shift Ahead Technologies leverages strategic workforce planning to overcome engineering talent shortages, accelerating velocity by 3.5 times and enhancing operational efficiency with a 55% reduction in OpEx.

According to Shift Ahead vision, the rules on how organizations may find the talent are not aligned with how quickly the digital economy advances these days. Korn Ferry says that by 2030, there will be 85 million people who don't have the right skills. This is a problem all around the world.

So, the question has evolved from "Can we get someone local?" to "How quickly can we bring in experts from around the world?"

This case study is about a leading IT company of North America that after collaboration with Shift Ahead's offshore remote staffing system was able to solve a critical software development bottleneck and, apart from reducing time-to-market by 40%, it retained a high-performance excellence culture.

The Challenge: The Consequences of Remaining Stagnant

The to-be client was a fast-growing company in the financial technologies sector and it was changing its directions, at the moment, while a strong product plan was still in place, the difficulty was that their local hiring in San Francisco was not matching the speed of company's growth.

At the point when one of their Senior DevOps positions was vacant, they lost on average $25,000 of potential daily revenue. Since the salary expectations locally were rising with no limits and the "war for talent" situation was such that retention was almost becoming impossible, the internal morale of the client was falling gradually with the existing engineers facing burnout.

More than "extra hands" had to be provided for and the possibility of a reliable partnership offering pre-vetted, highly experienced professionals that would fit into their existing Agile workflows had to be explored by them.

The Shift Ahead Approach: Using Offshore Talent as a Resource

The idea of just "ockinging out" has been going out of fashion and Shift Ahead went the extra mile by coming up with a plan for an offshore development partnership that was also a strategic one(SOI) framework.

It will be interesting to say that while the use of outsourcing for cost savings is the reason for the majority of 70% of companies, on the other hand, the top 10% firms that are experiencing growth use outsourcing for scalability and access to niche skills. Our work with the client was primarily focused on the latter.

To start, we found out what technologies the customer was using. They were largely React, Node.js, and AWS. Then, we searched for the best engineers in tech hubs in developing areas where the number of senior-level engineers was growing three times faster than in the US.

Step 1: Matching Culture and Technology

Instead of just sending over a résumé, the next step was to learn more about the client's culture. The customer was matched with a group of six senior developers that not only knew how to code, but also thought in a "product-first" style.

Unlike many traditional agencies, Shift Ahead ensures that our offshore teams work within a maximum of 4-hour time zone difference. This scheme makes it possible to have "Live Collaboration Windows" during which time real-time troubleshooting occurs.

Gallup research recently revealed that remote teams which have high engagement and synchronized communication record 21% increase in profitability. Slack and Jira environments of the client to which our developers were aligned turned the term "offshore" from one referring to "a separate team" to one meaning "an extension" of the team.

Phase 2: Technical Execution and Quality Assurance

In order to make sure that the collaboration brought about positive results, a strict "Continuous Quality" process was put in place. Among others, it consisted of the following:

· Review sessions of the sprint every two weeks: We started verifying conformity of the offshore work with the standards and quality of the in-house team.

· Implementing Automated CI/CD: Our expert engineers changed the tactics among client’s deployment pipeline, which resulted in a 32% reduction in build failures in the first ninety days.

· Knowledge Transfer Loops: Our strategic team promoted a documentation-first culture, so that every line of code written offshore was comprehensible and maintainable by the onshore personnel.

The Results:

Winning numbers

The engagement with Shift Ahead wasn’t just about job placements; it was an effective lever that dramatically shifted the financial performance of the client.

· Within half a year, the client announced a 55% drop in operational expenses relative to the costs of local hiring.

· More importantly, the technical backlog that had been accumulating for over one year was cut by 45%.

· The client’s engineering metrics revealed that the velocity had gone up 3.5 times and they were able to bring out their main micro-lending feature even 2 months before the scheduled date.

Why a Reliable Partner Constitutes the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

The gist for today’s CTOs. is very simple:

Remote offshore staffing is no longer considered a mere "budget hack" but rather it represents a strategic lever. However, the "positive outcomes" that we mention in our heading only become a reality when the partner assumes responsibility both for the growth of the talent and for the client's vision.

· Instead of just a vendor, the client became by choosing Shift Ahead his global innovation engine.

· The very first of the companies that will be profitable in their respective industry sectors are the ones that will understand that talent is global, but reliability is rare.

· We @ Shift Ahead are the ones that make up for this difference, offshore for you yielding success ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌onshore.