You’ve signed a contract with an agency, awesome! At this point you already know that agencies like ours opens a new window offer expertise and resources that can help you overcome challenges, increase efficiency, and achieve your goals.

Now that the executives, sales team, and lawyers have signed off on the project, how do you get off to a quick start to accomplish your business goals?

Access Provisioning

Provide access for the external agency before the project kick-off call.

Access provisioning can take anywhere from 1-7 days in best case scenarios. Our projects are a fixed retainer, and we begin billing from the project start date, whether we have working accesses or not.

Be sure to select your project start date while keeping in mind how long it will take to grant the agency full access.

As soon as contracts are signed, one of our project managers will reach out to provide information and begin the access process. Clients who have documentation around external contract access provisioning and are proactive about onboarding our team are able start projects without delay.

Update your Documentation

Update your readme and communicate QA process workflow.

When was the last time you set up your application locally? What does your QA process look like? How long does it normally take to review PRs?

Our PM and engineers ask these questions at the start of any new project. We’ve found that projects begin swiftly when clients have recently updated their readme, and can explain their QA process clearly.

If it’s been a while since you updated your documentation, or if you don’t have any, now is the time to whip something up to support the collaborative effort!

Establish Point of Contact (POC)

Appoint a clear decision maker and escalation point to facilitate seamless communication.

Depending on your organization’s size, the decision makers could be the same people who are about to collaborate with us. In many cases, our initial communication is with executives or lead engineers.

When a contract is signed, it is important to inform the agency who they will interact with daily, who is needed to conduct check-in calls, and who is a decision maker in the case of code or other types of project changes.

Explain the Business Case

Communicate the business case to the development team.

As you prepare your developers and engineers to work with us or another agency, it is useful to explain the business case, applicable scope of work information, how you foresee the workflow changing (if at all), and expectations around collaboration with external stakeholders.

Teams that understand their roles and responsibilities clearly can collaborate best.

Conclusion

While hiring an external agency may have some challenges, there are easy steps to take to prepare your organization and team to mitigate those risks and start projects without a hitch.

You can hit the ground running by documenting and clearly communicating you access provisioning, setup and QA processes. Having a clear project POC, and preparing you team with internal communication will make for a smooth and quick transition process.

Are you interested in working with our agency? We provide many services opens a new window including staff augmentation, Ruby on Rails Upgrades opens a new window , and JavaScript Upgrades opens a new window . You can also checkout some of our case studies opens a new window if you want to know more about past companies who have worked with us.