There are many ways to encourage your team to be more productive: salary rises, extra days off, team building, and more. However, these methods don’t work when your team is overloaded with tasks and can’t focus well on all business processes in your company. In this case, this just means that you need IT staff augmentation. It’s one of the most flexible outsourcing models, where a business hires outside talent to boost the performance of its internal team on a temporary basis.
This article will inform you about the IT team augmentation and the best ways to scale your development team.
What Is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation is an excellent way to quickly hire a skilled professional from your country or abroad. Simply put, this method allows you to quickly recruit workers for a particular project if there is a lack of workers. For example, during specific seasons or to replace sick employees. Augmenting successfully combines the advantages of outsourcing and the convenience of the company’s own internal staff, allowing you to quickly meet the need for missing workers.
This model allows business owners to quickly fill the gaps in their current projects using the help of skilled professionals. Team augmentation services offer highly skilled specialists such as software developers, quality assurance engineers, project managers, business analysts, designers, and others.
It should be noted that staff augmentation is not always a solution for staff optimization, but often just a necessity. If the company doesn’t have the technical ability to minimize labor processes using only the existing staff, they don’t have another choice apart from expanding the staff with the help of augmenting.
Staff Augmentation On a Temporary or Long-Term Basis
The IT staff augmentation is suitable for both variants: when you want to hire the whole development team or a certain number of specialists for as long as you need to complete some tasks within your project or when you need specialists for certain work.
Staff augmentation is convenient to apply in both cases: both when workers are needed for a short period of time and for long-term work.
Short-term staff augmentation is typically used by companies during the periods when their resources are not sufficient to meet demand: during vacations, when it is necessary to replace employees at their workplaces and keep productivity at the same level; to replace a specific employee who has gone on vacation or sick leave.
Long-term staff augmentation is used for more global strategic purposes, for example, when a company needs to take additional specialists for a large project. In this case, company usually
attracted highly specialized employees, professionals who specialize in rare technologies that can’t be hired on a long-term basis due to high price.
Advantages of Staff Augmentation
- It allows to significantly reduce the time required to hire specialists. This is a great advantage since trends are changing quickly which often forces you to start the development process as quickly as possible. Especially if apps similar to yours start to appear on the market. Hiring outsource workers, you won’t have to deal with HR-related processes. The company you partner with will provide you with CVs of the most suitable candidates that can scale your development team and bring you a lot of benefits. All you need to do is approve the best specialists.
- IT outsourcing companies offer specialists with wide experience. Your in-house team may have a prolonged experience in development, but it hardly worked on many various projects. Meanwhile, IT outsourcing companies are ready to provide you with specialists who have experience in engineering a wide variety of apps, and can work with many different software and tools. This allows them to predict and prevent issues that may appear during the development process. They can take your business to a new level.
- Outsource workers can complete your tasks in tight deadlines. The in-house workers are limited to work for a certain hours per day. The main goal of outsource specialists is to complete the tasks within the deadlines. This means that they can prioritize tasks and can deal with work faster.
- You can get the best value for money. The outsource workers don’t require office, equipment, and software. This allows you to save money: you only pay for the work done. Moreover, you can find outsourcing service providers from another country where the salaries are lower in comparison to the salaries in your native country. For example, you can outsource to Eastern Europe where salaries are 2 – 3 times lower than in the USA and Western Europe.
Why You May Need To Scale Your Team?
In order to get the most out of the resource augmentation, you need to make sure that this model is the best fit for your project. Here are some examples of cases where such an option may be beneficial for your business:
- You can’t find the IT specialists on the local market
According to research, conducted by CBI, “UK is losing out on £63bn a year as companies struggle to find people with digital skills“. CNBC claims that there are nearly 1 million open IT jobs in the USA. That is why resorting to a staff augmentation company is a popular option among business owners. More and more companies around the world resort to them to find experts with the right technical skills to meet their augmentation needs.
- You are struggling to find specialists during or after the pandemic period
In 2020, the world switched to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many office workers and development teams have moved online and have been successful in remote communication and collaboration. We are still experiencing the effects of the pandemic and it can sometimes be difficult to find and hire new workers quickly, especially for in-office work. The remote developers can work for you during the quarantine periods from any part of the world.
- You need to reduce the development costs
By hiring workers from augmentation services, companies can significantly reduce their costs. They may hire specialized professionals for a short period of time to work on a specific segment of the project. This helps avoid additional costs that the full-time employees need (bonuses, perks, vacation pays, etc.). Moreover, the rates in Eastern Europe for IT professionals are much lower than in most of Europe or the US due to lower labor costs.
- You need to meet a temporary demand.
Resorting to staff augmentation service when you need to meet tight deadlines of short-term projects is a really wise idea.
- You have several additional projects
The in-house may not be able to handle extra projects and complete them within deadlines. Especially if it’s involved in other big projects. This usually happens during seasonal spikes.
- Your project requires specific talents
If your project requires specialists in a certain area that you don’t have in your local team, you can quickly hire a temporary worker that can complete this task.
- You need to create a more effective business strategy
Some business owners choose to scale their team when they want to reduce the development time and launch a startup as quickly as possible, satisfy more needs of their customers, etc.
- You actively searching for the right partners for your long-term project
Many business owners tend to hire specialists from different software development companies to find the most reliable partner for long-term partnerships.
Staff Augmentation vs Dedicated Team
The main difference between staff augmentation and dedicated team models is that the first one works for one client. It usually works as an extension of the local team, can be involved in multiple projects, establishes close communication and working relationships with the local team and has a good understanding of the internal business processes in the company.
The partnership between the customer and the dedicated team usually lasts much longer.
Bottom Line
When businesses consider building an app, or just need some extra help for their current project, they often opt for a staff augmentation model. This allows them to increase the potential of the internal team and reduce development costs. Meanwhile, some companies are using this model to build their business strategies or use it as a source of an unlimited supply of top software development professionals for their projects. In any case, the staff augmentation model offers a wide range of opportunities to improve their projects and increase the productivity of their in-house team.
As you can see, extending your team is a good way to make your business more beneficial. The augmented team can do much more for your company than a regular local team.
Just make sure to determine the required skills, number of qualified software engineers that your company needs. You need to know the exact number of people you need to hire and how qualificated they should be.
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
