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Staff Augmentation Definition
Staff augmentation involves temporarily employing external experts on projects to meet deadlines or fill gaps that arise in internal teams, but each part is usually assigned independently.
A staffing service offers temporary help from outside experts that helps an organization reach its goals more quickly.
This approach has the advantage of not creating permanent employees but instead using flexible contract staff that only need to be paid and called on when needed.
It makes partnership exit easy as partners know their pay is only tied to specific projects or engagements.
As well as saving on costs associated with hiring full-time employees, outsourcing provides savings due to covering overhead costs such as taxes and insurance for you when needed.
Instead of hiring extra people, you will use only some of the time and can become costly over time. You get staff when and if necessary.
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The Staff Augmentation Process
Let's use an example to help illustrate how staff augmentation works: Imagine you own an online store looking for ways to enhance the shopping experience for its customers - these customers often prefer purchasing their goods in-person instead of shopping online - therefore an app would help your store stand out among competitors and become more available to potential clients.
Your entire team may already include someone who serves as a web specialist; their primary duty may include keeping the website current, secure, and protected from malware attacks.
While they could manage this project alone, doing it alone would take too much of their time away from other daily responsibilities or take longer than anticipated to complete mobile app development.
IT Staff augmentation services provide you access to talented app developers without going through an extended recruitment and onboarding process, helping your business achieve business goals faster.
Vendors do the hard work in finding you CVs of prospective hires so that interviews may take place before finalizing an agreement and signing contracts with applicants.
Read Also: Problems With It Staffing In The Us And How Staff Augmentation Can Address All Developer Concerns
This model of staff addition can be followed in four steps:
- Analyses: Here, you define your project and its goals. You also specify what external resources are expected to do. This will help you determine more quickly which specialists you need and the skills they'll have to achieve your project's goals within budget and time.
- Source of Talent: Consider the skills you require when hiring external experts. If possible, interview all candidates to ensure you get those who will best fill the skills gap of your existing in-house staff and meet your goals.
- Onboarding: You can help the chosen candidate by clearly outlining his role, responsibility, and limitations. This will avoid any confusion.
- Support ongoing: Providers of managed services ensure that they provide ongoing support by assigning an HR or account manager who will help build an effective relationship.
How to Use Staff Augmentation
If you are running out of internal experts to complete projects, you will ask yourself: Do I need staff augmenting? You can use these three factors to decide whether this is the model for you.
Project Length
Staff augmentation may be your ideal short-term solution. Otherwise, hiring from within or using another outsourcing model, such as managed services, could prove more cost-effective.
Staff augmentation, known as short-term outsourcing, offers excellent potential when undertaking three to 24 months of projects.
Confidentiality
Some projects must be hidden from the public. Other projects could be a matter of critical intellectual property.
Staff augmentation should be carefully considered in such cases. A signed service contract does provide some security. A risk is involved when you do not do the background check and hiring, and the expert cannot be seen face to face.
It's also essential to do some risk assessment.
Reduced Project Costs
As previously discussed, staff addition is a model whereby service providers cover management and administrative expenses as well as training costs, workspace rental space rental, and office rent costs for your project.
Your payment amount will only depend upon how many staff is needed - making budget management more straightforward as no short-term staffers need to be covered!
There Are Many Types Of Staff Augmentation
Six primary forms of staff augmentation exist. We'll discuss these types, their best uses, and some pros and cons.
This will help you to decide which type of staff augmentation you should use for your project.
Traditional Staff Augmentation
- What it Is: Traditional staff augmentation is hiring resources from a staffing company to augment your internal team. It's the classic way to segment a temporary staff sourced from a staffing company or service provider.
- When To Use It: The traditional staffing model is an excellent option for almost any project. This includes IT-related and non-IT-related projects.
- The traditional staff augmenting method provides excellent flexibility regarding how many external resources you need. You can even choose which resources to add to your dedicated team.
- Pros: The most challenging part of traditional staffing is finding a service provider or agency that can provide qualified personnel.
Independent Contractors
- Definition: Independent Contractors are the search for independent contractors and direct engagement with them.
- When To Use: Independent contractors can be an excellent option for projects with a vague initial goal. They are often willing to offer input about the overall project direction. They are also great when you only need one person to cover a specific role in your organization.
- Pros Independent Contractors are flexible and of high quality. Hiring an independent contractor has many benefits. Most contractors have diverse skills, so you only need to hire one person to cover multiple needs.
- Con: Finding a high-quality contractor who is reliable can be a challenge when hiring independent contractors.
Master Vendor Staff
- What it is: The master vendor staff is approaching staffing agencies to obtain many temporary employees.
- When To Use: The master vendor staff can be used by companies who need to hire temporary employees for sudden capacity increases that they cannot handle.
- Pros Master vendor staff are often inexpensive and can be scaled quickly to handle enormous demands.
- Con: Hiring a lot of temp workers takes a lot of work. You may also need consistent workers.
Boutique Agency
- Boutique agency: A small, boutique staffing firm focused on high-quality and narrowly defined skills.
- When To Use: Boutique Agencies are perfect for companies with unique needs and skills.
- The pros: boutique agencies have some of the best workers you can hire.
- Con: Boutique agencies tend to cost more than other alternatives.
Gig Platforms
- What it is: An online gig platform houses highly skilled employees, much like freelancers.
- When to Use: The Gig platform is best for short and minor tasks.
- Pros: The gig platforms are very flexible and fast if you need to start your project quickly.
- Con: The quality of the gig platforms' workers is variable. You must either be lucky or perform a thorough vetting process upfront.
The On-Demand Talent Platform
- Its nature: Online platforms that house highly skilled workers in a more structured manner than gig platforms are known as on-demand talent platforms.. On-demand talent platforms will typically do the vetting for you.
- When To Use It: Because the platform does a great deal of screening, it is helpful for any project.
- Pros Platforms for on-demand talent have excellent flexibility, speed, and quality.
- Con: Because the platform does some up-front screening and management, it can be more expensive than gig platforms.
What Is The Best Staff Augmentation Model?
You may be tempted to only look at immediate advantages, but selecting the correct model can make things much more accessible and prevent unnecessary delays.
What else should you consider before choosing a staffing model? These points are worth considering.
What Are Your Needs?
Ask yourself the following questions when deciding which model of staff augmentation to choose:
- What is my ultimate goal?
- How can I get the best out of my staffing resources?
- What is the best time to spend managing my external team?
- Given my current team's capabilities, how do I know what skills gaps to fill?
Evaluation of Candidates
As previously outlined, these questions can assist with evaluating candidates. But more care must be taken when hiring temporary team members, even in urgent cases; choosing incorrect people could cause unnecessary delays to your work process.
Examine their resumes to make sure candidates have managed projects similar to your own, get references who can vouch for them as the best, search online reviews of feedback/feedback received, and ask about workflow when calling them up - that way, you'll have an idea of the length of time it takes them and whether or not they meet deadlines, along with knowing just how good they are at their jobs!
Candidates that automate their work to increase efficiency can be beneficial. Ask candidates with this trait for a project summary and how they would approach your endeavour.
Staff augmentation allows you to hire external workers from any location - this includes offshore and nearshore team management - in any time zone; possible timezone differences might need to be resolved or overlaps in business hours addressed as you can work around time zone differences and overlaps; ask whether the expert has shown enthusiasm about working on the project; when an expert takes an interest, their task will likely get completed on time or even before schedule.
Test out with a Pilot Task
Start with a small pilot project to ensure you are on the same page. Tests are the best way to verify that your needs and requirements have been understood and to check the candidates' capabilities.
It is essential to take this step to avoid any significant obstacles that could lead you to unnecessary costs or hassle.
Take The Cultural Fit into Consideration
Keep this in mind when you are working with external offshore team members. Cultural differences can be a significant cause of hidden costs when miscommunication occurs.
Unpredictability and comprehension can be affected by a significant cultural divide. If this occurs, team leaders may have to manage the tasks more closely. Consider the work ethic and culture when you are recruiting.
Six Benefits of Staff Augmentation
Flexible Payments
You can employ as many experts as you like when working project by project, which may require a temporary staff increase.
If you need IT staff augmentation to work on an app, you could hire a UX/UI Designer, an iOS Developer, an Android Developer, and two Quality Assurance Engineers. You can keep developers full-time if you want to.
Cost Control
It takes more money to hire more full-time employees to take on new projects than to staff specialized professionals to do the same work temporarily.
You can avoid paying for the salaries and benefits of people whose skills may change after the project ends.
High Productivity
You hire temporary employees to complete a particular task or project. So, their efforts and time will be devoted to a specific task or project.
This results in high productivity and efficiency.
Knowledge Control
Staff augmentation allows you to keep a team of core specialists in-house. So, even if you bring in temporary experts to complete a particular project, your in-house staff can understand and manage the decisions made.
The in-house team will still have to maintain domain knowledge. Your in-house experts will make it easier for you to bring on new team members in the future.
Speed Of Integration Into Workflow
Suppose you want to add an additional team member to your company. In that case, there are many overheads to consider before they can be added to the pool of payroll for all house employees and temporary workers.
Integrating a new member into the workflow is much easier when you choose staff augmentation.
Offerings an Objective Perspective
A temporary specialist's outside view will help IT Staff Augmentation Companies plan on continuing their projects.
The temporary specialist can provide innovative ideas for project planning or workflow that the internal staff may not consider. This can increase productivity and offer a better solution for the current project.
What Is The Difference Between Staff Augmentation And Outsourcing?
Staff augmentation and outsourcing are often used interchangeably. However, there is a fine line between the two.
Here's a table that shows them:
Efficiency
Regarding efficiency, project-based outsourcing is the best option for traditional businesses and large projects.
Staff augmentation can be more cost-effective for small, short-term jobs and projects that are not as complex or time-consuming.
Flexible Payments
Outsourcing and adding staff can both offer good flexibility.
Target
The target is to increase the number of people who can use this language. Staff augmentation works best when you want to increase your resources for a particular problem or need.
Scalability
Staff augmentation can be scaled up more than outsourcing.
The Control Team
You have less control when you outsource the conventional way. Staff augmentation allows you to control how your resources work.
How To Make Staff Augmentation Work For Your Business
If appropriately implemented, the staff augmentation method can prove highly successful.
This list will help you to augment your team temporarily with external resources for success in the long term.
Choose Projects With Limited-Time Requirements
Staff augmentation works best with projects that do not need ongoing plans and don't involve software development processes, software engineering being one of the primary applications.
Staff augmentation could provide an economical alternative to direct hiring if your business requires a mobile application or website development services.
Staff augmentation can help your productivity drastically. Hiring developers for specific projects rather than permanently can save money over the long run; maintaining web and mobile applications is best handled in-house, while software developers or project managers require outside help or additional staff members for ongoing tasks such as web app or app maintenance.
Talent Gaps Can Be Identified Within An Organization
Analyzing your business processes can offer invaluable insight into any talent gaps within your software company.
A talent audit can pinpoint talent vacancies within an organization - be they existing project requirements or planning new ones. Once identified, after making a note of those that might need permanent resources or temporary ones based on project requirements (if so, staffing augmentation may be the way forward).
Identify Unique Skill-Set Requirements
Once you know which skill sets and roles in a project you wish to fill, the next step should be finding an organization which provides top talent to bring it all together faster.
Partnering with such an entity allows for rapid hiring processes so your product gets built quicker!
Staff hired for shorter duration also has the added advantage of knowing more about similar projects to your own and can bring their skill sets.
This can be invaluable; developers with extensive experience across various challenges will likely possess more comprehensive skill sets.
Read Also: Various Industries That Can Benefit from IT Staff Augmentation
The Best Practices To Augment IT Staff
Identify The Extra Talents You Require
Start by hiring people externally by identifying which qualifications and soft skill gap your team lacks rather than trying to fill an entire project.
Instead, focus on filling key positions that have an outsized influence on its success, such as project manager. If no one in your team possesses these capabilities or experience, staff augmentation may be beneficial; otherwise, it provides developers with unique skill sets as a way of augmenting teams that lack them.
Introduce Clear Communication
Establish clear communication channels early to create long-lasting relationships so all parties know who and where to turn for questions or issues.
When working with staffing firms, establish an assigned point of contact within their firm - usually an account manager. Still, it could also include project managers or other staff members.
Assign an official project manager to your team. This individual should coordinate with companies, ensure all parties remain on track, and serve as your go-to person for problems or questions with remote developers or quality assurance engineers.
Use Project Management Tools
As part of your recruitment efforts, when hiring staff for any project, you will require project management software to track progress and meet deadlines.
Take your time in selecting one that fulfills all your requirements if working with multiple custom software development teams; otherwise, it might be more efficient to adopt one standard toolkit across them all if using project management tools is beneficial but may need streamlining before going this far; not just limited to IT staffing - this applies across any business!
Jira and Trello are popular project management tools among software developers. If selecting an IT staffing firm with excellent project management practices, make sure they can train the members on how best to utilize these tools - Trello can manage projects efficiently while Jira keeps tabs on bugs or issues arising within any one team; either can help keep all teams aligned as one.
When using just one, this tool could serve all parties involved well together! If choosing the best IT staffing firm, they might already offer their project management process for which there might be no need for external tools - potentially leaving everything right at home!
Clarify The Scope And Objectives Of Your Project
No matter the size of your business, IT issues will only present themselves with help from outside sources.
Hiring an IT team might be beneficial; ensure it fits your requirements.
From the outset, make your expectations known: what type of project do you require help for, its timeline and any milestone dates associated with its completion? Working alongside an extended team may prove advantageous; ensure everyone knows their role if required.
Before seeking external assistance for more significant undertakings or complex scenarios, always consult internally with team members regarding scope or size before consulting externally for advice or services.
Divide The Responsibilities And Deliverables
Understand what you should expect from an outsourcer. A team with experience doesn't automatically mean they can handle everything you require of them; when comparing IT staffing firms, be aware of each firm's capabilities for doing what is within budget; remote developers might provide great help for short projects or tasks while in cases requiring long-term or complex problems more assistance may need an extended team of QA Engineers to assess them properly and resolve them swiftly.
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Wrapping up
Staff augmentation can save money when dealing with projects requiring more expertise, making your team more efficient while meeting deadlines more efficiently.
You'll have access to experienced specialists that ensure quality project outcomes.
Before choosing this approach, all necessary considerations must be made when choosing an optimal model and considering all possible advantages and disadvantages of staff augmentation strategies.
By carefully considering all these elements, you will maximize its use for both yourself and the entire organization; not only can staffing benefit individual teams but entire organizations too! It may only sometimes be feasible for companies to launch into staff augmentation after doing some preliminary preparation work - contact cisin a IT staff augmentation company for any assistance or questions related to staff augmentation strategies!
