Whether pulling staff from an existing bench or searching for talent outside company walls, building an effective “shared services” team that fits business requirements and meets an organization’s finance, technology, and talent demands can be challenging. Not only do businesses need to understand the specific skill sets that each team requires, but they also need to retain the right talent.

In today’s webcast, we closely examined the strategy for sourcing, hiring, and retaining informational technology professionals with Mark Minichiello, Director of Global Recruiting for Akamai, and Jim McCoy, Senior Vice President at Veritude.  (Side note:  “If you use the Internet for anything - to download music or software, check the headlines, book a flight - you’ve probably used Akamai’s services without even knowing it.”)  As competition for talent intensifies, organizations with multiple locations or a global workforce may find efficiently staffing a development team even more challenging. Compounding things further are country-specific privacy laws, cultural expectations and labor rates that vary by locale. Yet taking a cost-conscious approach to where you find talent in a competitive market requires a creative, comprehensive and flexible strategy. We also identified five key components and processes to help you execute your staffing strategy for successful project development.

During the webcast Jim and Mark shared their five strategies for shared services in IT:

1. Redeploy in-house talent
2. Create a staffing rate card to effectively compare costs
3. Evaluate locations for optimum cost benefit
4. Coach project leaders
5. Find staffing partners that complement your efforts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Strategy, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.