We believe empowering engineers drives innovation.
We believe empowering engineers drives innovation.
Hi, my name is Eric and I lead Rearc’s Internal Team.
Rearc has a different take on the traditional “bench” that you may have at your place of work. Called the “Internal Team”, it is a similar concept, where our team members go when they’re not on a billable engagement of some kind. What we do differently on the Internal Team is everything to build a stronger team and a stronger company. We dedicate time, resources, and support to this special function, and are proud of what that does for everyone in turn. Let’s look closer to see how Rearc does this.
One of the questions most commonly asked of me about Rearc is what do engineers do when they’re not on engagements? At many other consulting firms, engineers may find themselves sitting out or “on the bench” or worse, laid off. Here at Rearc, we do things differently.
An important function of the Internal Team is to give everyone a home when in between customer engagements. Regardless if one was performing staff augmentation, or delivering a project, everyone comes back to this team. Upon “coming home” to Rearc, they will attend a daily standup with their former team-mates, just like they did in the weeks before. They’ll also be joined by independent contributors, fellow Rearc-ers from other engagements, and new hires.
New hires also sign on to Rearc through the Internal Team. As a fixed-point in a busy contracting outfit like Rearc, the team provides a consistency for training that new hires need to immerse themselves in the Rearc culture. They also get a chance to make direct contact with their current and future team members, which is something an isolated onboarding team can’t provide. We’ve found that this creates a “melting pot” affect where people with a wide range of Rearc experience mingle and share stories and support each other.
Rearc is a diverse company with engineers all over the world, with substantial numbers in the New York City area. We consider ourselves to be mostly remote or “distributed”, yet are in constant contact and very socially interconnected. To do this, Rearc communicates a lot over a handful of online services.
The Internal Team is no exception to Rearc’s communication strategy by wisely using information technology to remain connected with each other. Our team standup is scheduled at noon Eastern Time, which helps us reach everyone in the continental US. We also make concessions for folks elsewhere too, by handling tasking and status asynchronously. Overall, it’s this simple combination of timing flexibility and constant contact that makes the program work.
A key function of the Internal Team is to destigmatize the concept of a company “bench.” While addressing some of the same goals, there are some differences.
Overall, the Internal Team is run, deliberately, as a company function rather than existing as a by-product of Rearc’s contracting cycle. All team activity is supported by a focus on team member communication with others in the company, investing in company infrastructure and in the team’s skillset. Leadership provides information regarding new contracting opportunities and forecasts possible upcoming projects. Paid leave is strongly encouraged during everyone’s time on the Internal Team, which may be harder to schedule once on a customer project. Combined, this emphasizes connectivity, communication, recuperation, and preparation. All of these things fight the typical sensation of “doom and gloom” that can surround a contracting bench, and provide a sense of “psychological safety.”
The Internal Team is responsible for a range of tasks, some of which are actually externally facing. The core of these are skill building and training in order to keep everyone on the team up to date on their areas of expertise. Or, in the case of new hires, becoming an expert in one or more areas. In all cases, the goal is to prepare everyone for their next engagement, whatever the task may be.
Rearc’s technology evangelism is another area that the Internal Team directly supports. Time permitting we draw from personal and professional experience to write blog articles and internal documentation. The latter are presented at monthly Rearc Spark meetings, quarterly Town Hall meetings, and usually become the subject of discourse afterwards. It’s this discussion and outreach that we’re interested in. It’s good that we want to do more to solve customer problems, but Rearc as a whole feels strongly about engaging with the broader engineering community.
Throughout all the things that the Internal Team does, we use an Agile Kanban board to track and prioritize work. In the absence of customer-like stakeholders, we instead place a priority on support and training, with evangelism and other exploratory work after that. Additionally, we make sure that everything is tracked so that nobody is overloaded. We try to keep to a maximum of two concurrent tasks whenever possible, and push for timely resolution of all tasks where possible. This also has the added benefit of making it easy to communicate “up and out” to other parties; I’ve never had to write a status report or brief since the board is always accurate.
The Internal Team also handles some of the company support and maintenance. The tasks here vary widely, but usually help support training and skill development, depending on the engineer and the task. For instance, Rearc maintains several sandbox environments for training that have some infrastructure elements. We also maintain two quests for employment applications, one for Cloud and the other for Data. At times, folks will also need help with access, permissions, or bugs in our various internal services; the Internal Team has the hours and the availability to help other Rearc-ers out. Lastly, the team sometimes augments sales engineering, HR (interviews), and even opportunity development.
Rearc’s Internal Team is the crossroads of inter-contract activity, internal company communication, O&M, and more. We work hard to train and stay sharp, but are also busy supporting our peers in their respective task areas, while not overdoing things. It’s much more than your typical contractor “bench”, and we’re proud of that.
