Resources As a Bottleneck

What’s the biggest bottleneck in a business? What prevents most businesses from succeeding when they seemingly have the right product, the right product-market fit, a good financial structure, etc.? What holds them back?

There are a lot of potential answers to this question. Bad leadership is probably the most common, or rather shortsighted leadership that attempts to focus on 20 different things at once instead of establishing a core offering and minimum viable products on other offerings. That’s certainly a problem.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in any business, though, is a lack of resources.

Or, rather, resources that are distributed in the wrong ways.

This has become increasingly a problem with the rise of tech. The rise of tech has meant different programming languages, different projects, different software solutions that teams need to understand and master in their work, and just consistent amounts of change everywhere.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say your team is working on a project that involves a lot of automated testing. You have built up a team with expertise in this specific area. You are doing great with automated testing both internally and for clients. But… then someone comes to you, because they are happy with your automated testing work. They want you to do more. They have a big project, worth a lot of money, involving augmented reality.

The problem is: you built your team for automated testing. You didn't build that team for augmented reality. But you want this project contract and the revenue that comes with it.

Now you have a resource problem. What are your options at this point?

• Turn down the contract and focus on automated testing. > This is bad because you lose access to additional revenue.
• Try to turn all your automated testing experts into AR experts. > This could work, but is very time-consuming -- and there is no guarantee they will reach the right level of expertise to make the project work for the client.
• Hire a bunch of experts in augmented reality.  > This works if you have the money to pay them, but full-time hiring is a gamble, and admittedly people lie about their skill sets and we, as employers, don’t “vet” (evaluate) those skill sets as well as we could.

You still have a resource problem. How are you going to get this second project and add additional revenue?

The main way to deal with these type of tech resources issues is to find a third-party outsourcing option that has expertise in different areas. For example, Serengeti works in multiple industries, including: 

• Industrial manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Energy
• Finance
• Logistics

Within those industries, we also work within a variety of technologies, including:

• Automated testing
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Augmented reality
• Machine learning
• Internet of Things, or IoT

What this does for our clients is to provide flexibility. They know that, when a new project comes their way, they will not lack the resources to complete it. They will have an outsourced team -- we called it an Extended Team, actually -- who will be able to serve as resources in a variety of different technologies and industries, not just highly-specialized areas.

Specialization is great and drives a lot of industries. But if you over-specialize, you can create resource bottleneck problems for yourself. What you need is the flexibility to undertake different kinds of projects, because you work with a team that has different kinds of expertise. That also means you can sell more software deployment projects because you trust your team to take on different challenges.

Flexibility makes the resource bottleneck problem be less of a problem.

To find out more about how to select the best software development partner for your business, download our checklist here: