When I joined Avinity, the company had been outsourcing all its IT work. They decided to bring everything in-house and hired me to build an IT team from scratch. My task was to set up the team and transition the outsourced work within 1-2 years.
Even though I had some job offers from some big corporations, I decided to join Avinity when I heard about this challenge.
Starting an IT team from nothing is an exciting challenge, but it comes with many obstacles. The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is the unfamiliarity between team members. If you hire an entire team from the market, you have no idea about their strengths, weaknesses, or how they will work together. It takes time to build trust and relationships.
My Approach: A Mix of Known and New Talent
To overcome this, I hired a few people from my own network—people I had worked with before and knew I could trust. These familiar faces helped set the foundation and brought stability. The rest of the team I hired from the market, bringing in fresh perspectives and skills.
This mix-and-match approach gave me both comfort and flexibility—I had trusted people to rely on while also bringing in new talent to innovate and grow.
Hiring the Right People
Finding skilled professionals who also fit the company culture is tough. Just hiring the most talented developers is not enough—if they don’t work well together, the team will struggle. I focused on attitude and teamwork as much as technical skills. It is important to make sure every new hire is aligned with the company’s vision and work culture and has the freedom to open communication from day one.
Setting Up Processes from Scratch
Since there was no existing IT team, there were no processes, no documentation, and no guidelines. Everything had to be built from zero. This is where your experience comes to play. If you have a few people in your team who you hired from your network(or previously worked with), you have similar experience fo the process. I started with basic project management tools to track tasks. Slowly introduced coding standards, deployment processes, and documentation habits. I kept things flexible—adjusted processes as the team grew.
Knowledge Gaps and Learning Curve
Since IT was fully outsourced before, there was no internal knowledge base. The new team had to learn everything while taking over projects. So I worked closely with the outgoing vendors to document everything before they left. Also encouraged team members to ask questions, experiment, and learn quickly.
Gaining Trust from the Business Team
The company had relied on outsourcing for years, so other departments were used to working with external vendors. Convincing them that the in-house team could do better was not easy. So, to win their trust, I made sure we solved and delivered small but important issues quickly and more efficiently. Also maintained regular communication with stakeholders to understand their needs.
Managing Workload and Expectations
When a new team starts, everyone expects results immediately. The reality is, it takes time to set up, hire, train, and build efficient workflows. However, I set some realistic but challenging timelines for transitioning work. It was important to prioritise critical projects first, rather than trying to do everything at once.
Starting an IT team from scratch is a long journey, not a one-time task. It takes careful planning, the right mix of people, and patience to make it work.
For me, the biggest lesson was that relationships and trust was as important as the technical skills. By building a team with a mix of trusted colleagues and new hires, and by focusing on process, learning, and trust-building, we successfully transitioned the work within the expected time.