The Challenge
A healthcare advocacy and navigation company helps members navigate healthcare and take advantage of wellness and support programs. All of that runs on its own software: a member engagement platform, companion mobile apps, and a set of administrative and provider tools.
The company had an ambitious roadmap, including a full rebuild of its member platform, and more work than its internal team could take on. It needed experienced engineers who could work inside its existing processes and security requirements, not an outside shop working at arm’s length.
The company needed to:
- Add senior engineering capacity quickly, without a long hiring cycle.
- Keep every developer inside its own tools, ceremonies, and change-management process.
- Scale the team up or down as the roadmap changed.
- Preserve knowledge as people rotated on and off the work.
The Approach
The engagement started small, with two senior full-stack developers joining the company’s team for a few months. As the work proved out, the company renewed and expanded it, moving from short terms to half-year agreements and adding developers at several levels of seniority.
BRIO’s developers work as part of the client’s team. They started on company-issued equipment and now work on BRIO hardware, using the company’s secure network access, work in its repositories and pipelines, join its daily stand-ups, and follow its release calendar and change-management process. BRIO provides the people, the team leadership behind them, and the backing to keep the team staffed.
The Solution
Engineers Inside the Client’s Workflow: Day-to-day direction comes from the client. BRIO developers pick up work in the client’s sprints and ship through its pipelines, just as internal engineers do.
A Team That Scales With the Roadmap: The team has grown from two developers to about seven, spanning developer, mid-level, and senior roles, with the mix adjusted each term to match the work ahead.
Platform Rebuild Work: The team contributes to the rebuild of the company’s member engagement platform, replacing legacy web and native mobile experiences, along with work on provider tools, administrative applications, and major releases.
Knowledge That Stays With the Team: BRIO maintains its own engineering knowledge base for the engagement, covering builds, deployments, architecture, and conventions, so new team members ramp up quickly and nothing is lost when people rotate.
Continuity by Design: BRIO onboards developers ahead of placement and plans rotations in advance. The client has asked for former team members to return, a good sign that the people and the fit are right.
Technical foundation
- .NET and .NET Framework back-end services
- React and Redux front ends
- SQL Server and Entity Framework
- API gateway and identity services
- Azure DevOps repositories and CI/CD pipelines
- Application performance monitoring
The Impact
What began as a short-term request became a lasting part of the client’s engineering organization:
- More than six years of continuous work across more than a dozen consecutive renewals.
- A team that has grown from two developers to about seven.
- Senior capacity available without a long internal hiring cycle.
- Engineers who work in the client’s processes from day one.
Staff augmentation works when the people fit the team, and the team keeps them. The renewals tell that story better than any metric could.
