Meet our Director of Extended Teams Brian Wyatt

As Director of our Extended Teams service, Brian is responsible for the part of Evolved Ideas’ business that provides skilled technical resources to extend or augment clients’ in-house development teams. This is a delivery model that works well for organisations that have an established development team and are experienced in running software development projects. Working with the team at Evolved Ideas allows clients to adjust their resourcing dynamically in a way that isn’t possible with permanent team members, and also enables access to experienced, self-sufficient developers, enabling a faster, more streamlined approach to recruiting, as opposed to the permanent market.

Brian has been involved in software development in one form or another since the nineties. He has worked in application development, large-scale implementations, analytics, and targeted marketing. He has had roles in business analysis, database design, consulting and account management. This has involved exposure to a lot of different technologies and approaches to developing applications. Brian is not a technologist; he started off in marketing, became a super-user, and then got sucked in…!

So, Brian’s focus, irrespective of the technology or the applications, has always been on driving tangible business outcomes. Having worked with a multiplicity of technologies, his focus has always been “how does it solve a business problem?” How does it increase revenue, reduce cost, reduce time to market, increase customer satisfaction…? That is what he believes you must stay focused on, and that has been his focus, whether he has been working with start-ups or Fortune 500 companies, with automotive giants or niche financial service providers. With Extended Teams, or Staff Augmentation as it’s sometimes referred to, Brian focuses on driving measurable business outcomes. However, given the nature of the model, this manifests differently from how it would if Evolved Ideas were responsible for delivering the project.

In the Extended Teams model, Evolved Ideas provides resources, but the client takes ownership of how the project is delivered. Although Evolved Ideas may not have full visibility of the project, and responsibility for the business case remains with the client, Brian and the team continue to support successful outcomes by using their experience to help clients structure and staff their projects effectively.

The process begins when Brian considers whether team extension is the right choice. Does the client have the maturity in software development, the right permanent resources and processes in place? Evolved Ideas has an assessment tool that can be used with clients if this is not absolutely clear-cut. For some clients, Brian has recommended that they use a managed project approach instead, where Evolved Ideas or another service provider takes on responsibility for the project’s delivery. This may, of course, risk the client going elsewhere, but without the right structure and permanent capabilities in place, team augmentation will not deliver the desired outcomes; Brian’s primary concern.

Secondly, Brian evaluates whether the mix of resources is optimal. Clients typically come with a shopping list of resources that they want. In many cases, this is a correct list; the client has the experience to know who else they need, but Brian does not like to assume this. He prefers to understand more about the project and the resources already in place so he can use his experience to advise if a different mix of resources would improve project success.

Finally, and critically, Brian focuses on whether the people being put in place will make the best possible contribution to the project. Aside from technical requirements, he likes to understand the culture of the team that is going to be extended, and the types of behaviours that are required. He works collaboratively with clients on the extension of their teams and is happy to conduct as much additional screening as required to ensure that the candidates presented are a strong fit. Brian stays closely connected to both clients and embedded team members, ensuring his confidence in consistent, high-impact contributions.