One of the things many nonprofit tech companies needs to wrestle with is how to make effective use of short-term contractors. I am reminded of one nonprofit CTO who said his finance department pushed back hard on his attempts to hire long-term people, but they would approve a block of money for short-term people in an instant.
It's understandable that nonprofits especially (though also for-profits) will be hesitant to fund long-term staff. They are taking on long-term commitments but they rarely have long-term funding. There's a reason that during down periods, short-term contractors are the first to go. The organization hasn't committed itself and avoids a predicament if funding drops.
However, there are downsides, namely:
- The knowledge gained by working through a problem doesn't stay
- There's initial spin-up and alignment on the systems and practices
- Especially because these people are not steeped in the practices and culture, they require extra project management overhead (though there could be other forms of management overhead that are avoided)
- There's a lack of long-term thinking. At worst, they build for speed and with low quality that needs to be fixed later. At best, they build well but don't have the context to think through how what they're doing fits in with the bigger picture.
- They are often in an "off to the side" situation with respect to the normal communication patterns of a team. This requires extra communication channels and additional management overhead.
There can also be benefits, besides financial flexibility:
- Short-term contractors can be subject matter experts who can handle a focused task better than the existing team
- Especially in a nonprofit situation they may be volunteers or low-bono people who would be hard to afford otherwise
- They can come in and resolve things that the rest of the team doesn't want to do
- They can relieve the team of a temporary spike in workload
- If experts, they can share knowledge the team would have struggled to acquire
Next steps... strategies for how to make short-term contractors effective...