Finding an external team that works as if it were internal is harder than it seems. There are providers that come and go, and there are teams that stay. The difference is not in the contract. Not because it is hard to calculate, but rather because when that figure is high, it reveals something that no commercial deck can fabricate: that the model works, that the relationship withstands the unforeseen, and that the client has decided year after year that it is worth continuing. With Grupo BIOS, that figure speaks for itself.
The context: when the internal team falls short
Grupo BIOS is a company with complex operations, multiple business units, and a technological demand that never stops. Like many growing companies, it reached a point where the internal technology team could not absorb all the backlog without sacrificing speed, quality, or both.
The solution was not to hire more staff, that process takes months and the business does not wait. The solution was to build an external development cell that operated with the agility of an internal team and the technical support of a specialized firm. That’s where E+T came in.
What we learned when the relationship wavered
This part does not appear in many success stories but it should! There was a moment when the relationship with Grupo BIOS was not good. And no, it was not due to a lack of technical talent or bad will from either side. But because the model we were operating with had structural flaws that sooner or later were going to take their toll.
It was billed by project. This created a dynamic known in the industry but little discussed: we would start, make progress, and at some point the project would stop waiting for definitions from the client but the team would still be there, with time running. Projects did not close before the next one started, so the backlog grew, prioritization on their part was nonexistent because everything was urgent at the same time. And when everything is urgent, in reality, nothing is.
The result was actually quite predictable: a team that worked hard without generating the impact that the relationship deserved and a client who was not getting what they needed, so the change that transformed everything was a model change.
Switching to a dedicated cell changed the nature of the relationship. It was no longer about delivering specific projects, it was about maintaining an active, aligned, and productive team continuously. This demands more from E+T, not less: the result of each month has to justify the next. But it also gives BIOS something that the previous model could not guarantee, a team that knows its operation deeply, that does not start from scratch on each project and that has the accumulated context to make better technical decisions over time.
What makes a functioning cell different
Staff augmentation is one of the most used (and most misunderstood) terms in the tech industry. For many companies, it means receiving a developer who executes tasks; however, for E+T, it means something completely different.
Over time and with the right model established, the E+T team found its place within the BIOS operation: operating under its guidelines, its methodology, and its culture. Daily dailies, direct communication, constant reporting of progress and delays, formalization of each agreement in writing. Not as a bureaucratic requirement but because that is the only way an external team can truly integrate into a complex operation.
What the team learned most quickly was a cultural issue: how BIOS thinks, how it makes decisions, what it expects when there is an unforeseen event, and how to communicate with tact and precision when there are multiple actors in the same conversation. That, without a doubt, is not learned in any course. It is built over time, with presence, and with the willingness to understand that the client's business matters as much as the code that is written for it.
The challenge that no one anticipates: prioritizing when everything is urgent
With the dedicated cell established, the next step was to build a joint prioritization process where the EMAST team and the BIOS leaders would agree together on what comes first, what can wait, and how unforeseen events are sized when they appear. Because they always appear. That agreement, built with agility, with SCRUM as a framework, and with direct communication as a principle, was what transformed the relationship from a request-delivery dynamic to a real team dynamic.
Formalize everything: the antidote to assumptions
With multiple actors, simultaneous projects, and decisions made on quick calls, the biggest risk in a work model like this is what remains up in the air. The team quickly learned that in high-speed environments, assumptions are the enemy. An estimate that was not put in writing, a requirement that was discussed verbally but never documented, a deadline agreement that each party interpreted differently.
The practice of formalizing everything: whether requirements, estimates, agreements, scope changes was not a bureaucratic imposition. It was the tool that eliminated misunderstandings before they turned into delays, and that gave the team the clarity needed to move quickly without losing quality. Thinking carefully about what to say, choosing the right words, being assertive without generating friction, those skills turned out to be as important as any technical knowledge.
Projects: from MVP to robust system
Over the years, the E+T team worked with BIOS on projects of very different nature, custom development, automations, integrations, but with a pattern that repeated several times and says a lot about how E+T thinks about technology.
The CUPOS project is the clearest example. It was born out of a business need that was first piloted in Zero One, E+T's low code platform. For months, real users interacted with the system, validated flows, identified frictions, and provided the operational knowledge that no initial requirement can fully capture. That pilot was the MVP, a real system, in production, learning from the business.
When the process matured and the volume grew, the team made the decision to migrate to traditional development: more robust, more optimized, built on everything that had been learned during the months of operation in low code. The result was a system that did not start from scratch but from the reality of the business.
That same pattern was repeated in other projects with BIOS: low code as a tool for exploration and validation, traditional development as the destination when the process shows it is ready to scale. Another example of the team's technical judgment was the migration of an automation built in UiPath. The original process consulted a risk system, interacted with Excel, and operated on Chrome, an architecture that made it technically feasible to replace UiPath with custom code. The team evaluated it, confirmed the feasibility through available APIs, and executed the migration, which made the same automated process possible, without the licensing costs of UiPath and with greater control over the code.
Not all automations allow this; there are desktop platforms and dockerized environments where UiPath remains the right tool. That evaluation criterion (knowing when to migrate and when not to) is exactly the type of value that an experienced team brings beyond execution.
What makes a relationship last
Staff augmentation relationships that last for years are not the ones where, when problems arise (and they always do), the team resolves them quickly, communicates clearly, and does not leave the client alone in the face of the unexpected.
With Grupo BIOS, the E+T team learned as much about software development as about business processes from industries it previously did not know. That mutual learning curve: BIOS understanding how E+T works, E+T understanding how BIOS thinks, is what turned a business relationship into something more like an alliance.
Remote work, far from being an obstacle, turned out to be an advantage: constant communication, the flexibility to connect when necessary, and the possibility of physical presence when the project requires it configured a model that today flows naturally.
The question for the CEO reading this
If your company is at the point where the internal team is not enough, where the backlog grows faster than it is executed, and where hiring more staff is not the immediate answer. The question is what kind of external team you want to build, one that executes tasks or one that integrates, that prioritizes with you, that understands your business and that is still there years later because it has proven to be worthwhile.
That difference lies in how the team works from day one. And in the willingness of both sides to build something that lasts.