Team meeting

Accelerating Projects with Staff Augmentation

Jessica Skewes, Director of Strategy
Jessica Skewes

The are times the adage “less is more” applies to web projects. It can make a project a joy. Aligned stakeholder priorities. A single decision maker. Structural consistency. Design consistency. Simple, easy to understand requirements. Fewer, clearer calls to action to maximize conversions. Sounds great doesn’t it?

But sometimes you need staff augmentation when, “less is more” doesn’t work to our advantage. Places like timelines, budget and resources. When these are scarce, it creates a challenging environment for project success.

If this strikes home for you, you may be a team lead for web projects. You may be an expert in one or two disciplines in the project life cycle. And you may be way too familiar with the pain of projects that have gaps. You may need to extend or enhance the skills of your team to meet a deadline or budget.

The good news is, if resource constraints are your challenge, there are options!

Staff augmentation can help.

Expanding your team with outside experts is a time-tested way to accelerate your project life cycle or build the skills of your internal team. You can get fresh perspectives on the latest industry trends. You can avoid groupthink by bringing more diverse and varied experience and skill sets to a web development project.

At Kanopi, we understand the stress created by aggressive timelines, resource constraints, and knowledge gaps. “Nimble” is a core value, and offering seamless staff augmentation is one of the many ways we bring it to life: we have successfully partnered with clients and other agencies in a variety of ways to help them achieve their goals. We love the challenge of blending our skills with client teams to help your internal staff perform heroic feats for your end clients.

Jumping in to lend a helping hand 

Here are a few recent examples that demonstrate our team’s nimble agility in helping to save the day on a variety of projects across varied industries. 

The Berkeley School of Information 

The Kanopi team helped Berkeley’s School of Information by building out their new website on Drupal 8, all while training their internal team along the way. The Berkeley team is now well versed in Drupal 8 and needs only minimal support to maintain their highly-customized site. Berkeley’s Senior Director of Information Technology was thrilled with the results of our partnership, sharing that “The Kanopi team’s expertise and enthusiasm were critical to the success of our project. We couldn’t have done it without them.” 

Benetech Bookshare

Kanopi partnered with Benetech’s team to establish a rapid and repeatable process to translate the organization’s Bookshare websites into any language, making thousands of books accessible for people with visual impairment or other print disabilities around the globe. The Benetech team built the API, working with the Kanopi team to build out the websites. 

BC Services 

BC Services was racing toward the finish on a tight timeline to launch its Intranet. They needed help building out search and a complex custom homepage. In addition to jumping in to build out features, the Kanopi team was able to find ways to improve the site’s user experience while reducing technical complexity on the site. And the best part of all was that the project gained momentum and came in ahead of schedule with Kanopi’s extra help. Our main contact was so excited about this that he waited to tell his director that the project was ahead of schedule until the Kanopi team could be there to see the excitement on her face!

International Rescue Committee (IRC)

The Kanopi team is currently hard at work to help IRC meet website deadlines after their technical architect left the organization. Kanopi’s developers took the lead, writing user stories to ensure clarity, creating tickets, coaching and training development staff, and keeping all work on track. 

Need a hand? We can help.

Even with a fantastic internal team of seasoned experts, there are times when staff augmentation can assist with an extra hand or a niche skillset. Contact us if your latest project could use consulting services or helping hands within our full spectrum of web project services.