Today software development has become an irreplaceable tool for catering to values and increasing revenue generations. Clearly, businesses are witnessing significant hiring trends in the market to boost their contingent work. This uncertainty in the rapidly changing business environment results in the rapid demand for expert IT services. Though the businesses have been facing the lack of skilled developers includes one of the biggest challenges in its way. Therefore, staff augmentation outsourcing agencies come to the rescue.
The staff augmentation model helps businesses with an optimized midway solution between outsourcing and in-house development services. Thus, ultimately benefiting the organizations to reach the desired goal within time and under budget. The aim of such projects includes providing efficient team members that can fill the necessary skill gap for their clients. Obviously, it offers the flexibility of adjusting the upscale of the desired augmented team according to the organization’s needs.
Around 92% of G2000 companies practice some form of IT outsourcing for their projects. Most importantly, the entire concept of staff augmentation focuses on the idea of collaboration. The goal includes contracting a group of experts with certain complementary skills who can work with your team to achieve common results. To be precise, the augmented workforce effectively immerses themselves into your in-house team. Thus, manages to achieve strategic goals keeping the company culture in mind.
In the end, staff augmentation indeed provides us with a strong tool for significant organizational needs. However, not much has been talked about the variant types of staff augmentation services, the pros, and cons of staff augmentation, or how to choose the right staff augmentation project. In this article, we have provided some detailed insights on:
What is Staff Augmentation?
What is staff augmentation? This question must be continuously moving in your thoughts by now. Well, the true meaning of the staff augmentation model involves the hiring of outsourced staff for a temporary duration. The consulting company finds and vets suitable incoming talents on the basis of the organization’s needs. However, sometimes things get very complex when it comes to understanding what is staff augmentation. However, most of the staff augmentation services aim to boost your staffing needs on a temporary basis.
It offers a popular outsourcing strategy that aims to help software development businesses add technical capabilities outside of the team’s core skill set. Hence enabling organizations to simply tap into skilled employees on a temporary basis to work partially or fully on a project. Furthermore, when an organization decides on going with the benefits of staff augmentation, it’s the agency that will bring the suitable workforce.
Clearly, the hired employees will be directly managed by the organization itself. Although, it’s crucial to realize that you are not completely outsourcing the entire project. But only a part of dedicated experts will help you to finish it effectively. You still have the core in-house team complementing the outsourced remote team. And practicing the staff augmentation project works best for short-term projects to fill the certain talent gap in your organization.
Continue reading the article to cover the basic learnings and fundamentals of what is staff augmentation model.
How does Staff Augmentation work?
Today most organizations opt for staff augmentation services when they have more work to do than they have internal staff to complete it. Instead of facing the tight recruitment market with a long hiring process, they find it more convenient to hire IT consulting vendors who can provide the right staff members for them. Hiring some temporary outside personnel in order to supplement the capacity of the organization’s functioning surely helps.
Clearly, the IT Tech Talent augmentation model includes the current popular solution these days. To be precise, as per the BusinessWire report, the software market revenue was expected to reach $968.25 billion by the end of 2021 globally. The staff augmentation model approach helps businesses to update their in-house staff with single or multiple temporary IT specialists. In simple words, the outsourced specialist helps the organization to achieve the desired goals with their skills for a short duration of time.
For instance, in case your organization needs to improve its website’s UX and your team needs a specialist in the field. You can definitely switch to the staff augmentation model in such scenarios. Or in case your in-house team is currently unavailable. You can outsource some talented experts for removing the skill gaps and reducing the time needed for projects. Moreover, it also gives you the freedom to negotiate your budget with the experts.
Types of Staff Augmentation Model
Before understanding the benefits of the staff augmentation model, it’s important to define various types of staff augmentation projects. Clearly, the types of staff augmentation vary according to the demands of various business needs.
| Types of Staff Augmentation Model | Description | Examples |
| Commodity | These types of staff augmentation services fit perfectly when you want trustworthy employees without the need for any specific skillset requirements. Thus, fulfilling the requirements for reliable experts without particular skills. | For instance: manual labor, warehouse workers, retail, or team for basic factory events. |
| Skill-based | These types of staff augmentation models work best when organizations require certain levels of skill sets for accomplishing their goals. | For instance: requirements for multi-lingual teammates, typing skills, or use of spreadsheets. |
| Highly skilled | As the name depicts, this category of skill augmentation model demands an advanced level of skill set. Usually, employees need significant training and experience in the field for attaining a high skill set for the job role. | For instance- software engineering, brand designing, and contract law. |
Types of Staff Augmentation Services
When understanding the insights of what is staff augmentation model, it’s crucial to learn different types of staff augmentation too. Clearly, we have a wide range of options when it comes to engaging staff augmentation talent in your organization. However, going with the suitable one totally depends on the requirements of the business processes.
-
Traditional staffing providers
First, comes the traditional staffing providers who aim to provide temporary labor for organizations. Evidently, such agencies provide a high level of flexibility to their customers. However, it’s slightly difficult to look for highly skilled talent from these service providers.
Talent type: Skill-based commodity
Best for: These types of staff augmentation services work best for non-critical projects which don’t require any advanced skill sets.
Examples: Experis, Adecco, and TEKsystems
-
Master vendor staffing provider
The motive of master vendor staffing providers includes helping organizations with high-scale staffing programs. Furthermore, the utmost advantage of such agencies includes their low-cost scale. On the other hand, finding high-quality talent might be inconsistent in this scenario.
Talent type: Commodity
Best for: Such types of staff augmentation services specialize in providing highly commoditized labor needs.
Examples: Manpower, Kelly, and Randstad.
-
Specialized/ boutique staffing and consulting firms
These types of staff augmentation services aim to benefit small-scale agencies that focus on temporary high-scale talents in their team. Such agencies offer a highly qualified workforce for achieving the targets on time. However, the cost per head is costlier when compared to other types.
Talent type: Skill based highly skilled
Best for: It’s most suitable for an organization that needs a specialized workforce with high-scale employees.
Examples: Examples of such services include PointB and Patina Solutions.
These types of frameworks offer users a digital solution that provides direct access to an independent workforce. Although, sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate between suitable employees in larger marketplaces.
Talent type: Commodity skill-based
Best for: Most organizations select such types of staff augmentation services for improving their skill flexibility in important projects.
Examples: Some of the popular Gig Platforms include Upwork and Freelancer.com.
-
On-demand talent platforms
On-demand talent platforms offer us another online solution for curated high-skill talents. Similarly, these types of staff augmentation services benefit organizations by deploying an advanced-skilled workforce quickly. Thus, aims to improve the speed, flexibility, and quality of the significant goals. On the other hand, the only disadvantage includes the remote distribution of suitable talents.
Talent type: Highly skilled
Best for: Here the framework focuses on high skills rather than other task-based workers for commoditized skill sets.
Examples: Some of the big On-demand talent platform names include BTG and Toptal.
-
Direct-independent relationships
Lastly, direct-independent relationships help organizations with independent providers directly engaged by the organizations. It aims to fulfill the requirements of the project with the help of outsourced expertise in that area. Therefore, benefits the business with quality work that comes with low-cost hiring budgets. However, sometimes it’s difficult to maintain active communication with reliable individuals.
Talent type: Skill-based highly skilled
Best for: Here the agency focuses on a skill-based highly skilled staff augmentation model.
Examples: Some examples of top market direct-independent types of staff augmentation services include TalentNet and WorkMarket.
Why should you support the staff augmentation model?
Now let’s understand the benefits of staff augmentation in detail. Understanding, these benefits of staff augmentation will help you to realize the need of adding a new member to your team.
Working with additional professionals allows you to precisely handle the task requirements faster and with fewer challenges. Furthermore, filling the skill gaps makes complex tasks seem much easier. Lastly, you can increase the overall capacity of work that leads you towards the path of improved quality.
Sometimes you need to fill the skill gap of certain experts on priority bases. This solution offers the best answer to meet your short-term needs. Furthermore, it also removes the cost and time you need to put on training and onboarding new members.
Expanding your team with specialized professionals with certain skills benefits the team’s quality insurance. With staff augmentation, organizations can easily overcome the requirement of specific skill sets that lacks within the in-house team. It enables you to add professionals without actually hiring them permanently.
Implementing the staff augmentation model offers us a super flexible service with endless convenient options. Moreover, you can simply add or remove the manpower requirement whenever you need to update the project’s progress.
It’s very convenient to add a new member that can help your team to achieve the common goal. Moreover, the staff augmentation model offers easy adaptability to complex business needs. It enables you to adapt to the dynamic changes in the project quickly.
One of the most important advantages of implementing team augmentation includes access to a wide range of talents. The solution works perfectly for improving the quality with the help of experienced professionals whenever you feel the need. Lastly, it lets your in-house team work with solid experience specialists that can assist the project.
-
Lower Costs and Better Efficiency
It removes the need for additional expenses for hiring as well as training processes. To conclude, we can surely say that the staff augmentation project offers us the best method to minimize operational costs while maximizing the productivity of your projects.
These were some prominent benefits of staff augmentation that you should know. Now, it’s crucial to understand the use cases, before moving to the pros and cons of staff augmentation. This will help you to effectively plan how to be successful with staff augmentation projects.
When to use Staff Augmentation Services?
By now you must be wondering about what is staff augmentation uses cases. The staff augmentation model aims to offer solutions for quick personnel shortages to businesses. Here we have discussed the use cases when staff augmentation services are best fitted to choose. You need staff augmentation when:
To extend your in-house team, you definitely need to add more reliable people. Furthermore, it’s crucial to update your present skillset at the time of new launches. These temporary employees can help you to perform specific tasks in a better way in specific fields.
-
Need to expand the team fast
In case your project demands a specific developer with a significant level of experience and deep knowledge related to the field. Well, surely the process demands a lot of effort and time for recruiting that perfect click. However, with the benefits of staff augmentation model, it simply requires you to contract an agency and find that trusted profession. Therefore, helping you to cut that extra hiring time in evaluating multiple CVs and skills.
-
Have a tech-savvy manager on your side
This model enables users to enjoy effective management on their side. This means users enjoy full control over their project management with the guidance of the field expert.
-
Need people with high-level skills
Of course, skill level plays an important role in software background as it requires major time and training to hone. However, most organizations avoid providing the time it takes for the right amount of training to their employees. Obviously, it’s faster, cheaper, and more convenient to directly engage trained experts in your projects. Furthermore, experienced workers tend to share their useful experiences helping the working environment.
-
Need better communication with the team
Augmentation of a professional team will surely help to improve your communication process. It gives you the perfect control as well as benefits employees to enhance their engagement with the team. In short, they work as a part of your in-house team by providing daily work reports to you.
Pros and Cons of Staff Augmentation
Here we have discussed the pros and cons of the staff augmentation model in detail.
Pros/ Benefits of Staff Augmentation
Some of the most notable benefits of staff augmentation include:
Adapting to staff augmentation projects removes the need to outsource any hiring teams or burden HRs with urgent workforce requirements. Thus, helping your organization from saving its hiring resources.
You can totally rely on trustworthy vendors for additional manpower requirements. Furthermore, it also provides users with the option to determine their preferred experience area and further specifications.
With the staff augmentation model, the services provide you with plenty of options for the IT experts you need. Whether you want a single highly skilled professional or a large team of manpower workforce.
The flexibility of adjusting the scale is completely in the users’ hands. Furthermore, the staff augmentation project even allows users to customize their demands from payment plans to experience periods.
In the case of staff augmentation projects, you can directly communicate and enjoy full control over the team members. You can personally manage their assigned tasks and plan the task progress reports. Unlike another outsourced development team, where the experts are only reasonable to the vendor for every detail.
Hiring the staff augmentation project teams ensures you with the most dedicated experts that aim to achieve your goals effectively. You get a suitable workforce that entirely focuses on finishing your project on time. Thus, helping organizations to concentrate on multiple projects at the same time.
Evidently, working with an augmented workforce enables the business to test its chances of profitable operations. It lets you expand your growth without the fear of full-time workforce commitment.
Furthermore, this enables you to finally execute your potential plans with reduced risk of failure. Organizations can actually try as well as test their market expectations by hiring a workforce on a project basis. Hence, increasing the possibility of growth alternatives with a reduced investment loss.
Executing your plans with full-time experts provides us with an expensive option to test the possibility of market acceptance. On the other hand, working with an augmented team gives us a cost-friendly solution with budget-friendly hourly rates. Moreover, the benefits of staff augmentation projects come inclusive of the expenses of hardware/software development costs, training, taxes, and more.
Cons of Staff Augmentation
Team augmentation comes with some challenges as well. Below we have outlined some key challenges that you should be familiar with to face them appropriately.
-
Language and Time Barriers
The most discussed challenge that the client faces with a staff augmentation project include the language and time barrier. With different native languages, the possibility of misunderstanding can be high. However, you can overcome this barrier by testing the English proficiency level of each staff member.
Remote employees not only face the language barrier but also the barrier of different time zones. Although you can face this challenge too by scheduling a flexible meeting schedule that helps to enhance communication. Lastly, you have multiple apps in the market to help businesses plan efficient schedules with different time zones.
Evidently, the cost of one bad hire can result in project delays, security issues, and increased overrun expenses. The ultimate motive of augmented developers includes prioritizing cost reductions over other factors.
Thus, it leads to a compromise on the quality of the project. However, businesses always have the option of verifying one’s background skill checks by collecting feedback from their previous clients. This gives them a quick overlook of the capabilities of the focussed employees before hiring.
Security concerns include one of the major hesitations when you decide to hire outside people for a particular project. Incorporating third parties and providing them the internal access to information increase the threat of privacy invasion.
Hence, businesses look for trustworthy staff augmentation agencies that provide frequent security audits. Lastly, the organization must form proper protocols and let them be signed by the contracted employees for guaranteed privacy.
In most cases, businesses practice staff augmentation with the goal of quick project completion. But what if the performance of the augmented team does not offer the best of its promises? This will only increase the time and effort of the organization.
Therefore, it’s super important to have a deeper insight into the candidate’s portfolio before contracting them. The agency will not provide a reliable manager who controls or bears responsibility for augmented solutions. Henceforth, you need a reliable manager with enough experience that can help to manage the ongoing tasks for the best results.
These were some of the major pros and cons of staff augmentation that you must learn about.
How to Succeed with Staff Augmentation?
The right implementation of the staff augmentation model really helps the organization to change the ultimate bottom line in its desired flavor. Understanding what is staff augmentation benefits the organization to improve its functioning. Below we have discussed some points to consider while implementing the staff augmentation model correctly.
-
Identify the skill gap in your company
Firstly, you need to evaluate and analyze the actual demands of your organization. In simple terms, you need to identify the lacking points your business needs to work on. This will help you to determine the skill gaps in your functioning. For this, you need to access your upcoming project requirements and test how your earlier projects lacked them.
Secondly, it’s very important to compare and choose the right agency for filling our requirement of skill gaps. Well, definitely you cannot compare different providers as their strategies can be totally different from each other. Hence, it’s super important for businesses to research the working culture of desired agencies.
You can definitely follow up and track the previous records of the potential providers. Understand their policies and how they can actually help you with your project requirements. Do they suit your working environment conditions or is their communication process efficient?
It’s critical to understand the pros and cons of staff augmentation services without actually testing them. Well, there’s always the option to try and test different vendors for your project needs. In this way, you can actually decide which agency suits you the best as well as how they can help with your further projects.
-
Make remote developers feel the effects of being with your local team
In case your team is collaborating with remote developers, you need to make prominent efforts to build a good relationship among the team members. Furthermore, you have to improve the communication process to make sure both the in-house and remote teams can collaborate effectively.
Furthermore, healthy employee relationships benefit by improving the working culture of your organization. Lastly, you can find plenty of good communication tools in the market that aims to improve employee engagement.
-
Ensure clear communication
Again, the communication process holds the key to unlocking effective teamwork. Clear communication helps employees to share their ideas as well as improve the bottom line. Team members should effectively communicate so that everyone can contribute to the project effectively.
-
Embrace tools and technology
The right tools and technology work as a game changer for your organization. Especially, in this modern world, where we have tools for almost every process of business. It’s super important to utilize such tools to improve the development cycle of the organization.
What is the difference between Staff Augmentation, Dedicated Team Outsourcing, and Project Outsourcing?
Organizations often face dilemmas when it comes to outsourcing IT projects. They often get confused about choosing the top cooperation models i.e staff augmentation, dedicated team outsourcing, or project outsourcing. Clearly, each of the sets has its own pros as well as cons. Although the best choice of method totally depends on the project’s needs. Some of the prominent factors include:
- Development budget
- Desired skills and project requirements
- Time-to-market speeds and deadlines
Staff Augmentation
Where staff augmentation defines the process of hiring an employee to internal staff. The difference between this solution and regular hiring includes that it only hires a certain professional or team for a specific period.
These are not permanent employees but fully integrates with the internal teams. To conclude, the ultimate benefits of staff augmentation include reducing hiring times and efforts connected with it.
Dedicated Team Outsourcing
When you plan to hire a dedicated in-house team, you enjoy total control over the project. In simple terms, here you collaborate with remote software houses covering a wide variety of software services. Evidently, it’s believed that your software team will value and care more about the outcomes of the project.
However, integrating a dedicated outsourced team needs comparatively higher money and effort to assemble. Especially when the requirement is for a particular project, hiring an in-house specialist would be unjustified.
Project-based Outsourcing
Project-based outsourcing as the name suggests provides users with all the aspects of software development stages. Here customers need to pay for a specific professional selected for a service provider’s employees. Moreover, the biggest disadvantage of such a method are that the clients are not aware of who is working on their project.
Hence, it involves a lack of communication between the client and the professional. They can not effectively contribute and decide the changes to improve the development process.
Staff Augmentation vs Dedicated Team Outsourcing vs. Project Outsourcing: A comparison
| Parameters | Staff Augmentation | Dedicated Team Outsourcing | Project-based Outsourcing |
| Team | Fully dedicated as well as exclusively recruited contract-based employees | Specific professionals selected for a service provider’s employees. | Fully dedicated in-house recruited team |
| Tech stack selection | Performed by client | Service provider | Performed by client |
| Office and workstation provided by | Service provider | Service provider | Performed by client |
| HR management | Service provider | Service provider | Performed by client |
| Payroll | Service provider | Service provider | Performed by client |
| Project management and control over team | Performed by client | Service provider | Performed by client |
| Efficiency | Cost-effective for smaller projects | Combination of typical outsourcing makes the software house more reliable | Most effective for bigger projects with traditional processes |
| Focused on | Emphasizes on delivering input (additional staff) | Focused on quality assurance | Focuses on delivering output (improved quality |
Some Discussions and Misjudgments about the Staff Augmentation Project
Discussions
The utilization of staff augmentation projects works best for short-term projects with smaller durations. Unlike the outsourcing method, it enables users to make negotiable agreements. However, the method might not fit perfectly for every scenario like long-term projects.
Some projects involve supreme secrecy for safeguarding their interest. Here, we have to carefully select the vendor agency to maintain the project’s privacy. You can obviously create a bulletproof agreement with contractors in such circumstances.
A lot of organizations feel it’s difficult to manage a contingent workforce. The reasons could include the presence of misunderstandings related to the project. In simpler words, around 50% of the staff contract time was spent ramping up the context. The solution might not work best when it comes to projects including heavy complexity.
Misjudgments
-
Staff Augmentation as Cost Avoidance
People often feel that they can ignore the cost of paying benefits by incorporating with contracted staff. This misconception might result in spending more from the budget for augmented staff when full-time employment could offer a better solution.
-
Staff Augmentation Is More Expensive
Most organizations feel that staff augmentation could be costlier than hiring full-time. They think the hourly rates of professionals could charge them more than the fixed monthly salary. But they forget that the monthly salary is exclusive of all the additional benefits that can cost them more. Furthermore, you have to only pay the contracted professional on the basis of their per hour of work.
-
Staff Augmentation vs Managed Services
Staff augmentation is often misconceived with modern managed services. An augmented team enables an organization to quickly scale certain functions. On the other hand, the solution of managed services fits perfectly for long-term infrastructures and security initiatives.
The staff augmentation model brings more to the table: Final thoughts!
Evidently, hiring in-house IT experts requires a lot of time and money for the organization. Especially if you want to focus on high-skilled specialists your decision needs to be more precise. However, it becomes a challenge when you want to expand your team for crucial projects on short notice. For such a scenario, incorporating a modern hiring model like staff augmentation is surely the best choice for organizations.
The time and cost of recruiting full-time employees could be enormous. But with the benefits of IT staff augmentation, you can achieve the target with highly skilled professionals in less amount. Hence, provides a great way to include experienced specialists on a contract basis and avoid long and complex traditional recruiting methods. However, comparing the pros ad cons of staff augmentation and other methods, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that this solution definitely brings more to the table.
Moreover, the benefits of staff augmentation provide elasticity to update the scale of the resources on the basis of your requirements. In this article, we have discussed the in-depth meaning of what is staff augmentation as well as the pros and cons of the staff augmentation model.
Looking for an IT Staffing Agency to help you hire the top IT experts? Well, CronJ helps recruiters connect with elite IT professionals! Contact us to get started now.
