Maximizing the effectiveness of service delivery for an offshore software development partner means orchestrating many moving parts. From ensuring smooth proposal development for clients, hiring the right candidates, to balancing expertise across different industries and domain areas, the demand for excellence is essential.

So what does it really take to ensure successful delivery of software development services for external clients? How does a leading firm partner with companies large and small to execute on vital projects?

In this interview, Maksym Riumin, Head of Delivery Practices at Dev.Pro, talks about best practices he uses to make sure that the right talent is in place, and the teams have what they need to help clients succeed in their projects.

What strategies does your team use to ensure high-quality project outcomes?

Maksym: Our Delivery Practice team brings together leaders from various fields like software engineering, project management, quality assurance, development operations, and business analysis. Our main job is to gather and preserve the company’s expertise. Projects vary in length and complexity, with some accumulating more specialized knowledge over time. We collect, keep, and share this expertise across projects.

Our strategy focuses on gathering and sharing knowledge, identifying top experts, and finding effective ways to pass on this expertise to others within the company.

What are the key metrics and practices for maintaining project excellence?

Maksym: Project assessment is crucial. We regularly conduct PM assessments and are currently preparing templates and training technical specialists to do similar assessments in other areas. After the audit, trained technical experts can advise on the project’s development strategy, highlight gaps, assess their criticality, and help communicate this information to the client, explaining the benefits of suggested improvements.

Key KPIs include the number of audits conducted and project health check status. Green means everything is good, yellow requires attention, and red signals potential business risks. We also track more detailed metrics, such as the number of issues resolved and post-audit improvements made.

By comparing results from subsequent audits conducted for the same project and area, we can see if any progress has been made. If issues decrease, it means we are doing everything right. If their number stays the same, we review and adjust our approach.

Some teams struggle with maintaining expertise. What are the most effective ways to transfer expertise within teams where the process is either poorly developed or non-existent?

Maksym: This problem has to be addressed on multiple levels. The best-case scenario and a “win-win-win” situation is when contractors discover personal growth opportunities through mentorship, project processes improve, and clients see clear benefits. So, everyone gains something from this: the contractor, the manager, and the client.

We have many examples of this working well. Our Delivery Practice team offers its expertise to managers and contractors, explaining how we can help. We usually start with a thorough project assessment to understand the context and then deliver a detailed plan.

Recently, we did this for Heartland. We presented our strategy to the client, who saw its value and agreed to implement it. This way, everyone benefits – the client is happy, the project improves, and the team gains valuable experience. We also often involve the specialist who did the initial technical assessment to support the project during implementation. This hands-on approach lets us see results firsthand and verify the effectiveness of our actions.

What are the best practices and approaches to nurturing and developing talent within the company?

Maksym: We identify several development paths for our people. Our Delivery Practice team collaborates closely with HR, Career Development, and Dev.Pro University. Ideally, individuals should be self-motivated. We work with both managers and contractors to show them which different growth opportunities exist. If motivated, they can continue to grow within their project, guided by a technical expert who identifies areas for additional contribution that benefit both the project and the contractor. If that is not possible, Dev.Pro University can offer development in areas unrelated to the project, like soft skills, hard skills, leadership, and more.

The company also has several active communities (e.g., the interview community, the technical expert community, and the pre-sales expert community). If someone wants to grow but can’t do so within their current project, we can be flexible in meeting their needs.

How does Dev.Pro’s interview community help to hire the best talent?

Maksym: We started building this community when I first joined the company. The goal was to establish standardized processes and rules for selecting the best candidates. As the company grew, others expressed interest in joining, so we combined our efforts.

When the job market was highly competitive, we had to fight for candidates. We aimed to attract the right talent who shared our values and were interested in long-term collaboration, while also ensuring a positive interview experience for everyone, even those who didn’t ultimately fit Dev.Pro’s requirements.

We developed common approaches and practices, documented them, and trained our people, explaining the benefits. As a result, about 30% of our contractors are involved in or contribute to the interview community. What’s more, this approach has been successful globally. As Dev.Pro expanded beyond Ukraine, these practices have proven invaluable and universally effective across different markets.

What is the difference between Dev.Pro’s interview community and the standard interview process that other companies employ?

Maksym: It all comes down to motivation. Our interview community is like an exclusive club of people who genuinely enjoy what they do. We do not just invite technical experts to evaluate someone’s skills during the interview. Our tech experts are there from the beginning – starting with the position opening or even the initial kickoff call with the client, where we clarify what the role involves and what kind of candidate we need.

During these kickoff calls, our technical experts determine the candidate’s required level of expertise, understand the scope of the candidate’s future tasks, and learn more about the project and processes. This helps us create the ideal candidate profile and adjust our hiring efforts accordingly. So, Dev.Pro’s interview community is a dedicated group of motivated people who love what they do and get a kick out of sharing their knowledge and continually improving their skills. They aim to leave a positive impression on candidates with their professional approach and minimize the stress associated with job interviews.

Should small companies consider adopting this approach, or should they start with something simpler and scale up as they grow?

Maksym: It makes the most sense for smaller companies. Here is why:

  • Any mistakes made during the hiring process tend to have a bigger impact on smaller companies. For example, if a company with only 35 employees hires someone with the wrong soft skills, it can negatively affect the overall team atmosphere.
  • Smaller companies can more easily build a close-knit community of motivated individuals who focus on quality and regularly participate in knowledge-sharing meetings to analyze case studies, discuss successes and failures, and explore avenues for improvement. In larger companies, this sense of community is harder to achieve. They may have dedicated groups of technical experts with clear processes for training, selection, testing, feedback, and motivation, but the feeling of belonging to a community is often missing.

We are currently just the right size for this – neither too small nor too large. We have a great base for developing such a community and gradually transitioning to a more scalable and structured model as we grow.

Which strategies do you use for attracting and hiring top-tier talent in the software development industry?

Maksym: First, we create a detailed profile of the ideal candidate, considering their hard and soft skills before we start hiring. We know projects and people vary, so we strive to find the perfect match. That is why we always consult with our clients to learn as much as possible about the position and understand the candidate’s tasks, both initial ones and those further down the line. We consider all these factors because they influence long-term cooperation, which is our main goal.

Secondly, we conduct experience interviews. At Dev.Pro, we focus less on the individual’s academic knowledge and more on their problem-solving skills. For example, when we give candidates a take-home assignment, we are interested in how well they can discuss it with our tech expert during the interview and how efficiently they can explain their thought process, collaborate, ask and answer questions, and incorporate feedback. We care about how they work with others because that is how work gets done in real life.

In simpler terms, we are less concerned about whether the candidate knows textbook definitions of OOP principles. Instead, we want to be sure they can apply these principles in practice. We train our experts to evaluate this using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to discuss past experiences and ask additional questions for deeper insights.

This approach has been useful during our global expansion. In Latin American countries, it is easy to overlook great candidates if we focus solely on academic knowledge. That’s because many of them are unfamiliar with the terms we use in Ukraine. However, this does not mean they lack the required skills or experience.

Many leading companies today use this proven and effective approach, but it is not without challenges. Teaching people to conduct experience interviews is not always straightforward. New experts in our community sometimes struggle to shift from the traditional academic approaches to this practical, experience-based method. In this case, we get our Career Development department involved to rely on the experience of our most seasoned interviewers. 

Is the experience interview a simulation of actual work and collaboration on a real project?

Maksym: It is. Before the interview, we send a brief agenda to the candidate explaining the process without listing specific questions. This helps reduce the stress and lets the candidate know what to expect. It makes it easier for them to talk about their experience during the interview without worrying about recalling specific textbook answers.

We can see that this method is effective when candidates who had a great recruitment experience at our company gladly agree to join our interview community and learn how to do it themselves. There is no better feedback.

What is the role of pre-sales in driving business growth?

Maksym: The pre-sales team acts as a bridge between the sales and delivery teams. When sales bring in a potential client, our pre-sales specialists take over. They analyze the client’s needs, determine if our company has the right expertise, and figure out the best approach for the project.

Pre-sales tasks can vary, from organizing technical calls with our experts to drafting proposals that best suit the prospect’s needs and clearly outline our project execution plan.

Our cooperation with pre-sales involves helping them identify the right experts. We can cover a broad range of needs, including finding suitable expertise in project management, software engineering, or quality assurance. We can connect them with top knowledge carriers within certain domains like the restaurant business or fintech. Or we can help locate specialists trained in specific technologies. Some clients might even request details on the number of specialists we have and the scale of their past projects. Our job is to quickly find the most suitable people for each task.

We also recognize that people have different strengths. Some excel at demonstrating their expertise in meetings, and others are better at providing valuable content for pre-sales activities. When the pre-sales team has a request, they come to the Delivery Practice team with details about the client and their needs. We then find the right people and form a team.

While it may not seem too difficult, there are challenges. One of the biggest is that technical contractors might have no experience in pre-sales, which is a unique and highly specialized area of business development. Not every technical person has the corresponding skills, so we must prepare them before involving them in a meeting or other pre-sales activities.

For us, pre-sales is a distinct area where we build a community of talented specialists. We onboard and train them, evaluating their client-facing and pre-sales skills. We analyze who excels in meetings, who can effectively present our expertise, who is strong in creating pre-sales content, and who has the right skills to pitch our company.

These are our tasks when it comes to working with pre-sales. While the Delivery Practice team handles many collaborations, this is the most crucial one because it is key to business development and company growth.

What are the most effective collaboration techniques between the Delivery Practice and pre-sales teams?

Maksym: One primary technique is ensuring everyone understands their role and feels comfortable in it. Technical contractors are used to being given a task and trusted to find the best way to handle it. In pre-sales, they must take a more proactive approach – they do not just wait for instructions from the client; they need to tell the client how things should be done. To help with this shift in communication, we train our contractors to present solutions confidently and guide clients effectively.

Another common scenario is when an expert with extensive knowledge is asked to create a proposal summarizing their expertise on one page. They often struggle because they do not have the sales skills to tell what will grab the client’s attention. In these cases, the pre-sales team helps refine the content. Once these technical experts are trained, it is easier for them to focus on what is most important.

In summary, what is your process for ensuring successful service delivery for clients?

Maksym: The Sales team finds the client, and the Pre-sales team works with them to identify their needs. If necessary, they involve the Delivery Practice team and other specialists. For example, we involve business analysts if we need strategy or estimates. For designing the project architecture, we bring in architects. If there is a specific area of interest, like test automation or performance testing, we find the right experts for that, too. This team can even help kick off the project (e.g., create a Proof of Concept). It all depends on how the collaboration develops.

At Dev.Pro, delivery leaders like Maksym play a pivotal role in ensuring our clients achieve project success, coordinating across teams and making sure the right teams are there to execute. To learn more about how Dev.Pro’s IT experts can transform your project management approach, reach out to us today.