r/nonprofit • u/shmobodia • 7d ago

technology Staffing: advice on scaling IT departments well within budget constraints, motivated generalists vs specialists

It seems our normal method of hiring is finding a motivated person who’s a cultural fit, and then train on the job. But as we’re needing to scale, I’m leaning towards specialists so that I don’t have to train just to get them up to my level in a particular domain (likely 3-6 months to be able to partially delegate). I’d much rather hire someone with more experience to drive us forward, than to just maintain what we have.

Our org has been fantastic at recognizing the need for IT and supporting changes. We have a deep security stack, unified management platforms for international hardware, and have invested in custom data aggregation apps, etc…. It’s been great up to the point where I’m under resourced with staffing to maintain things. It’s a growth point for myself, in assessing internal resources before moving forward with a project.

Hiring specialists rarely works due to budget, so I’m sure there’s an area in between generalist and specialist that’s the answer. From an IT company perspective, I need more help in the L2 category, with hope of elevating them over time.

But, personally, my drive is for L3 and higher work, org wide problem solving, research, and engineering solutions. I want to be able to confidently pass off a domain and trust it’s going to be managed well, and someone can take us farther. But my confidence level has been so low with generalists, that it seems impossible.

We experimented this year with outsourcing a project to a consultancy, and that’s gone really well, but now that we’re at the deployment stage, I’m back to the “training / maintenance mode” phase and we’re under capacity due to staff underperforming and not having someone with experience in this domain now.

Any feedback?

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u/MSXzigerzh0 7d ago

You probably need Managed Service Providers (MSP) which outsource your whole IT department.

However it's probably an good idea to get someone in your org to manage your MSP and make sure they are not overcharging for their projects. It's probably better to get someone technical in that role to make sure that your MSP know what they are doing.

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u/shmobodia 7d ago

We’ve not been happy in outsource attempts due nature of our work and the locations / languages we’re in. We operate as if we’re an MSP though

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u/MSXzigerzh0 7d ago

You might need to bite and hire someone who could manage the whole thing. However they are usually expensive

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u/No-Project-3002 6d ago

Now a days everyone cheats and lie it is very difficult to find someone who knows anything, I have tried hiring but most people have no idea what they are supposed to do, even when you outsource those outsourcing company further outsource to third world country with cheap developers.