Years ago, Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular addressed the shortage of data scientists, positing that “organizations already have people who know their own data better than mystical data scientists.” The shortage of developers is much the same. The answer to most companies’ developer shortages is likely to look within, and make those developers more productive. Open source is a key (though not the only) way. InfoWorld, September 17, 2018, Business can’t win without developers, but you need more. Photo: Edx.org

Developing our own people was always, in my experience, the best way to get the talent we needed. If we didn’t have the time to train and mentor our own folks, I’ve never found that we had the time to effectively integrate new folks who allegedly already had the skills we needed.

See why Only 30 Percent Are Engaged At Work And It Is Our Fault

I would often focus on our underused people. Those people who for whatever reason seemed to have been marginalized and were not working on high priority projects. Just getting a few of these people working and fully productive provided more of an increase in productivity than did pushing our most productive people to do even more.

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The same also applied to finding the expertise we needed. It was almost always the case we had someone in-house who was already deep diving into what we needed to know. In one case I moved a software programmer over to network administration because he spent all his time tinkering with the network and not getting his programming done. Our networking issues disappeared with his optimizations and we freed up a slot to bring in a new programmer.

See finally why we don’t need all those experts to help us

Making the best use of the staff we already have solved more resource issues than did any request for more money or more staff.

Are you making the best use out of the people you already have?