If you haven’t read Talent Time Tracking using Slack – beyond Fixed Price vs Hourly, it’s a must read for getting the most out of this platform.

To address this specific issue however, LD Talent has a number of mechanisms in place to ensure the responsiveness of software talent. Firstly, our matching algorithm boosts more responsive talent. We also use daily Slack-based check-ins to inculcate a communication rhythm, and Slack-based work sessions to ensure that every 30 minutes of time tracked is communicated in terms of work output. That being said, sometimes a talent can become unresponsive due to unforeseen circumstances. In such a case, we recommend the following course of action:

Sometimes it takes trying several talent (3+) and limiting them to 1-2 work sessions to see who is the best fit for your project. Sometimes it takes building a slightly bigger team to make sure you can move as fast as possible.

If you need to find more talent you can use the “Invite Talent” and “Hire Talent” links pinned and bookmarked in your ‘ldc’ channel (our network is always growing and new talent become available often).

Creating a bigger team familiar with your codebase has another benefit in that you don’t depend on a small number of people who know your codebase. Not everyone has to be working at a given time, but given a time of need for speed you can call on a few people who know your codebase.

Even though all our talent are vetted, skilled, and responsive, you may not want to put all your eggs in one basket. We recommend trying / interviewing multiple talent so that you can evaluate them and get the right cultural match and work dynamic in place. You can tell them to spend no more than X number of work sessions on a particular subtask to keep costs under control.

In situations of inadequate speed or responsiveness, you can also add (rather than replace) a talent to the project to help it move faster along and solve issues that the current talent is getting stuck on.

What we've found useful in terms of time estimation is MPST (minimal possible subtask) and TV (task visualization). Specifically, you could go through the tasks you want the talent to do, and add them to a Trello board. Then, for each task divide it up into the smallest possible subtasks by visualizing the process of how the talent will do them, consulting them as necessary. Then, ask the talent to label each subtask with how much time they think it will take, and cross reference their progress so far to see whether it matches up. Add up the hours and that is a better estimate of how long your work really will take as opposed to just asking the talent to estimate how long it will take. If the talent is not able to give estimates for the subtasks, then it may be useful to work with a different talent.