After finding out from our ODC account manager 2 weeks before our lead developer was about to get married and move to Norway at the same time we were to embark on one of the most important projects in the short life of our company thus far, meant that mild panic was about to set in.
We were assured by our ODC partner that there would be enough time to find a suitable replacement and conduct a handover but this did not calm the "squeaky bum" feeling that had descended. If this was our own in house based team whose leader was about to move on with life (granted we would have ensured more than 1 week notice) it would have meant the beginning of a very painful process of interviewing candidates, contract negotiation, skilling up etc, a process that would have taken up many man hours.
After 1 week we had our weekly conference call with the ODC team and there was news of a suitable replacement from another team; by the end of week 2 after a rather fast and frantic handover process our new team leader was up to speed and ready to take on the project work with the minimum of delay and impact to our client projects.
Because of the access to a wider resource pool of existing developers, our ODC were able to find a suitable replacement in a timeframe that would have been impossible for us to achieve in-house, this combined with decent project documentation and well commented code meant that we did not have to spend weeks or months finding and skilling a new recruit and could focus our time on managing the client business development and project delivery process with little to no interruption.
Excellent, "squeaky bum" feeling gone.....
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