You probably have heard a lot about staff augmentation and still couldn’t figure out how it differs from outsourcing or other ways to extend a team. Well, staff augmentation refers to contractual outsourcing service for complementing the in-house development team. Staff augmentation needs to determine the existing team strength and capabilities and the skills that are needed. Thanks to this resource fulfillment strategy an organization can easily hire employees and manage teams quickly.

To put it in easier terms, when there is a shortage of skilled employees, an organization can quickly hire new resources to fulfill the gap. This is similar to the way an organization can expand the in-house team of experts by hiring some professionals temporarily. Though for a shorter span of time, the temporarily hired out staffers quickly integrate with the existing team and collaborate on the project. This brings together the advantages of both outsourcing as well as in-house hiring.

Apart from meeting the skill gap, staff augmentation is also effective for reducing costs and processing time of recruitment, payroll management, and project execution. This model is also successful because it is comparatively more scalable compared to the in-house hiring of staff. There is also less obligation for continuing with the staff beyond the specified time frame.

Do you want to expand your IT team through a staff augmentation model? Are you still in dilemma about whether staff augmentation is appropriate or not? Well, hereby we explain the key benefits of staff augmentation.

Lesser Recruitment and HR Formalities

Since there is no complete transfer of responsibilities for the staff here, you can do away with the necessary recruitment and HR formalities and focus more on your business goals. Practically, the team of full-time experts is expanded with professionals from third-party sources.

The outsourced specialists basically get to work on their client’s premise for executing a particular project. On the other hand, the model can be scaled up or down easily. You can get rid of some external staff or can increase the number of external employees.

Add Expertise & Experience to the Team

You may already have a team with employees having less expertise and experience. Now by getting external staff onboard you can bring some trained and skilled professionals with adequate project exposure and experience.

When you hire experienced professionals from mid-levels and senior levels, you can do away with training and skill development programs. You can just assign projects straight to the professionals and set clear expectations for the project outcome.

Incorporate the Most Needed Development Skills

You may need experts for particularly one development project or you may need professionals for the entire business operation. In any of these cases, you can just get on board the required skills to meet your project needs.

Instead of hiring some professionals with variable expertise and skills, for each task and job you can get onboard the particular skilled professionals you need. This ensures augmenting and extending the development capabilities and skills of the company as well.  

Enhanced Hiring Flexibility

When you are able to hire a skilled worker temporarily for development projects, you can get it done quickly and with ample opportunities to make a better bargain on hiring costs. This ultimately helps in saving both time and money.

Since for an outsourcing team you need to pay for the particular time of engagement or the particular project, this saves all your financial commitments for any regular employee. Thus outstaffing can help bring down the hiring costs.

Cost Reduction without Compromising Output

The skilled workforce expanded through staff augmentation helps in doing away with the long-term and cost-intensive employee management and other commitments.  When you need skilled staff, you can just hire some professionals and when there is no requirement, you can just get rid of them. All the monetary commitments, future management, and retention challenges, and other costs and efforts can be simply avoided by embracing staff augmentation.

Staff Augmentation has Its Risks as well!
 
Let’s not forget that just like the stupendous benefits of staff Augmentation for IT and development companies, there are several risk factors as well. Since you have hired external resources to work along with an existing team, you may not experience smooth team collaboration for all the team members.

Moreover, you often need to exercise stricter control over the outsourced staff and that remains another major challenge. Lastly, for a company having organizational task schedule problems, the newly hired outsourced staff may not be able to fulfill their responsibilities as expected.

Learn from few Staff Augmentation Use Cases

There are too many use cases or examples of staff augmentation in the IT field. Here we are going to provide a few of them.

• When you reinforce the in-house development team for an ambitious app project you may need specialists in a particular framework or development technology. This is when staff augmentation model of hiring works. This happens specifically at the time of releasing new app projects.
• Staff augmentation also happens in all instances of working with a shorter deadline. Since recruiting skilled employees can take a long, staff augmentation fulfilling the skill gaps can be a great alternative.
• It is very probable that you need a particular skill that you may not need for other projects in the future. In such times hiring skilled employees for a specific time period can be immensely helpful.
• You also can go for staff augmentation just because of using an outstaffing agency as a screening layer through which the best and most skilled resources can be hired.
• Lastly, the development consultants and technology experts when offering access to dedicated developers for their clients, can just offer the best technical advice and help with strategic development plans.

Wrapping Up

Staff augmentation comes as the right model for expanding existing resources, particularly in the context of IT and software development companies. Staff augmentation in more ways than one ensures the availability of the best skills and expertise across different domains. You get the most skilled experts at the best pricing and with the least responsibilities.