Introduction

At the onset of COVID, remote working faced many hiccups, especially in delivery quality onboarding new resources. Life Sciences research companies had a lot of business traction during this period. While working for one of the prominent global customers in the life sciences domain, BRIDGENTECH delivered an extremely flexible, fast, and efficient team augmentation model. As a result:

• It was able to modify the structure of a core SaaS product that ensures zero product time downtime, 99.7% accurate code quality using the Full-Stack Developers Only Model.
• It was supported by automated testing and using the best practices of software development to deliver a project that boosted the performance of the SaaS and its usability and user coverage.
• The model eventually evolved into a Managed Services team in its own right and became a flag-bearer case study for BRIDGENTECH.

The FinTech Industry

At the onset of COVID, remote working faced many hiccups, especially in delivery quality onboarding new resources. Life Sciences research companies had a lot of business traction during this period. They were actively involved in the fight against the pandemic, especially in life sciences and genomic research. However, with extreme challenges in onboarding new resources; who were unwilling to change and switch jobs due to uncertainty, the employer was staring at a massive risk of project delay and cost overruns. The work backlogs and delays in hiring were directly hindering the growth of the company.

• Quarter one of this year was the most significant funding quarter on record: It exceeded the previous record set in Quarter 2 of 2018. Over more than 600 deals, VC-backed fintech companies raised $22.8B. It describes a 15% and 98% year-over-year (YoY) increase.
• Mega-rounds lead this quarter’s funding growth: There were around 57 mega-rounds of $100 million-plus this quarter, a new record, which collectively estimated 69% of the full funding in the quarter resulting in double deal size from $19.3M to $37M.

About The Client

The client is a global pioneer in pharmaceutical, food, environment, and life sciences product research. It is one of the front-runners in testing and laboratory services in pharmacology, life sciences, clinical studies, and genomics. The organization has over 50,000 staff across 900 separate independent companies and 800 laboratories in about 50 countries. The client specializes in thousands of methodologies that help evaluate the safety, composition, origin, and purity of life sciences products of interest for a very distributed set of clients.

Goals & Objectives

The aim was to hire some outstanding experts, swift and reliable, who can share the load with their existing team already overburdened with the project challenges. But, unfortunately, there was not enough room for orientation and training, so experts from similar domain work experience were eligible.

The following were the expectations from BRIDGENTECH:

• Getting projects done within the timelines is easy and stress-free now.
• To enable quick access of experts required for each project on a contract basis
• Train the new resources swiftly and ensure that they are project-ready from day 1.

Challenges

There were these particular challenges for the client:

• Software Experts in the life sciences domain are typically used to a not-so-advanced technology stack, especially among the monolithic architecture of products managed on on-premise data centres. i.e., full-stack developers who can code and interact on the cloud using microservices architecture are tough to find.
• The client wanted candidates with a minimum experience of 5 years and that too available within the next 30 days.
• Because of the chosen technology stack, the developers needed to work on a particular development framework and a no SQL database like MongoDB, which is still a very emerging technology.

This scenario made the target set of suitable candidates very limited.

Additionally, not many candidates were available for freelancing or switching jobs at the time of requirement. Finally, the cost of available candidates onshore had become expensive, making it very difficult for the client to hire affordable resources that did not impact the project budget.

The Solution

Our solution was to find a new Internal Manager at our own cost who could emulate client scenarios, do excellent pre-screening, offer candidates in small batches, and let them amalgamate into an existing team by sharing delivery responsibilities and coach team members to bond and sync.

Strategy A:

Technical Project Management Support for finding the right guys. We identified a very senior subject-matter expert who could take the initial technical interview, vet the candidates in-depth and give fast feedback on their experience and relevance to the project. It helped us save much time by not lining up non-relevant resources.

The subject-matter expert ensured

• Project guidance in case of design uncertainty
• Recruitment guidance in case of profile confusion
• Delivery guidance in case of resource delays in deliverables

We hired the expert at our own cost. Then, we leveraged his experience across the project delivery until the candidates were also interested in joining the client directly for the long term. By the end of the project, the client offered lucrative job offers to all the resources, which was eventually accepted by a few. This process made the onboarding of new employees painless and stress-free for clients while we tackled the nitty-gritty.

Strategy B

Recruitment excellence for finding guys quick and relevant

• We did a thorough understanding of the job profiles and the project needs before defining the resource qualification checklist.
• We used our Proprietary 5F recruitment process, which enabled us to find candidates who are less likely to get rejected in the interviews and selection process.
• Furthermore, we were able to find the candidates not just on job portals, but we also leveraged an extensive social media search for the right guys.
• Our work strategies are unique, and that is why we keep our clients happy by providing them with the best in the least possible time.

We implemented the team augmentation in batches, with each cluster consisting of two candidates complimenting each other in delivery and learning along the way.

There were initial hiccups because of international, intercultural gaps in working together. Still, once the team started to help each other in their work, the bonding quickly followed, and a solid team got created in record time.

Technologies & Skills used

• Strong Core Java, Spring experiences on JDBC, Data, multi-threading
• Strong UI development skills and expertise using Angular
• Spring IOC for Dependency Injection
• RESTful web services using Spring MVC, JPA (Hibernate), Spring JDBC & Data, XML Parsing using SAX/DOM,
• MongoDB Knowledge

The Results

This particular case enabled our ability to move leaps and bounds into full-stack software development, leveraging the best technologies and innovation to manage big data, cloud, and on-premise data management. Moving our operations into the Azure cloud environment has also reduced cost and on-premise data centre footprint. In addition, the new features developed by our team have enabled the product to adapt fast to the latest industry changes, thanks to its stretchable microservice architecture.