What is It Staff Augmentation?

Let’s start with IT staff augmentation meaning. Generally, it is a method of empowering your existing team by hiring qualified technology employees on a temporary or permanent basis to do certain tasks. IT staffing firms can help you hire competent technical people for your internal development team, either temporarily or permanently.

This approach has two significant advantages: you may select people that exactly match your requirements, and you can scale up or down your team as required.

Offshore IT staff augmentation is a service that gives your workers new abilities on demand. It allows companies to rapidly find talents worldwide to complete highly-specific or urgent tasks, allowing for scalable and efficient project development.

SERVICES PROVIDED BY STAFF AUGMENTATION COMPANIES

Let’s take a look at the benefits of partnering with a resources and staff augmentation agency.

Resources training:

Outsourcing companies are responsible for the knowledge and skills of their employees. By providing corporate and external training, and encouraging experience sharing within the team, they make sure that their developers match the standards and have the expertise needed to work on client’s projects.

Staffing for a project:

You as the client provide the following information:

• The professionals’ skills that are needed for the project.
• Prerequisites for the job applicants that must meet certain requirements to be considered for a job.
• Preferred background.
• Qualifications and certifications.
• The number of positions that need to be filled.

The outsourcing company has to select and prepare the candidates according to provided requirements.

Integration of new hires:

Newly recruited remote employees are integrated into in-house client teams to help them understand their work preferences, blend into the company culture, and contribute to the company’s growth.

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE CONTACTING IT STAFF AUGMENTATION COMPANIES

When considering a staff expansion, it’s essential to first figure out what you want to achieve. Doing your homework allows you to make future cooperation smooth and more effective. So this is what you have to prepare in advance:

1. Decide what professionals you need:

What is the reason you want to grow your team? It is a crucial question to answer before starting your search for a staffing agency. Maybe you want to hire skilled software engineers to fill in the experience gap for a specific task, or your reason may be to speed up the development process and reduce the time to market.

You must evaluate your workforce needs. Decide whether you require product designers or front-end developers for a certain stage in app development, or a quality assurance engineer to join the team on a regular basis. In some cases, you can search for managed services – an autonomous team that works without your supervision.

2. Research the companies:

Examine the history and past achievements of your potential outsourcing software development firm. You may check with previous clients to discover how effectively the company operates.

Also, research the reviews from the company’s previous clients. You can find them on Upwork or Clutch. Also, these websites are a good place to scan customer satisfaction ratio.

3. Communicating standards:

The way workers connect with one another is one of the significant factors influencing project success. Ensure that your chosen company and its employees are ready to provide you with regular project progress updates. Also, define the preferable communication channels, including video conferencing tools, chats, task trackers, etc.

4. Timeline of the project:

When you decide to extend your team with new remote developers, you are still responsible for the project timeline. Think in advance about the scope of work and preferred deadlines. Be specific and realistic, and discuss the possibility of timely delivered work with the staff augmentation company.

You will have to assign tasks to your remote employees and manage them just as you do it with your in-house team. So be ready to take the responsibility for the development time and outcomes.

If you want to grow your existing development team, this article about the best way to extend your team can help you a lot.

THE ADVANTAGES OF THE STAFF AUGMENTATION

IT staff augmentation plays an important role in the business of the new era. Remote work is getting normal, so you can benefit from cooperation with worldwide top talents.

So, the advantages of IT staff augmentation services are as follows:

Exceptional output: Developers you hire through staff augmentation companies dedicate 100 percent of their working time to a single project. It is more effective than a project outsourcing team that may manage several projects at the same time. A greater degree of dedication and determination is required when focusing on a single task.

Price-effectiveness: The benefits of hiring remote employees are obvious. There are little to no commercial or organizational expenses, such as offices, workstations, or utilities, to worry about. You pay a fee, and the vendor takes care of all the operational costs, enabling you to focus on your core business.

Easy recruiting: There’s no need to interview hundreds of candidates to hire the one (or few) that matches your requirements. Your offshore staff augmentation vendor takes over all the recruiting procedures. You get to know your new employees only when they are ready to start the work.

Expertise is instantly accessible: You can solve any project problems and minimize downtimes by using the expertise of the company. The outsourcing vendor has access to a wide pool of skilled professionals, including software developers, UI/UX designers, scrum masters, product owners, etc. Upscaling your team is a matter of a few days.

Flexibility: Scaling down is as easy as scaling up. You may have multiple reasons to reduce the number of employees, be it budget reduction, changing business plans, whatever. With IT staff augmentation services you are not tied with contracts and possible fines.

Also, if your requirements change, a developer is easy to replace, and you won’t have to spend any additional money on the move, as you would in case of engaging with recruitment partners.

Various background: Software developers that work in outsourcing have gathered experience in many industries and with startups on different stages. Their various backgrounds become their competitive advantage. They often change perspectives and come up with fresh and efficient ideas. Don’t neglect their dedication and initiative.

IT STAFF AUGMENTATION: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

No fulfillment of expectations:

Software development requires a lot of time and effort. Managers devote a significant amount of effort to developing, integrating the right team, and testing the software’s quality to guarantee that the final product meets all end-user requirements.

However, the core team and remote employees often have differing opinions on the final product appearance and usefulness.

How to fix:

To deal with this problem and minimize the chances of any outsourcing arrangement failing, set clear expectations with your team extension partner from the very beginning. When you choose the best software development firm, you will get regular updates from the start of your project, allowing you to determine if the development process is on the right track and on track to succeed.

You must do a comprehensive investigation of potential partners, taking into consideration factors such as track record, client feedback, and communication records. Once the IT team has been selected, make sure they record the project’s needs, response timeframes, and communication methods on paper.

Customer service quality:

Thousands of erroneous lines of code, project delays, cost overruns, and major security concerns for end-users may all be the consequence of a poor programming services quality. Managers who prioritize cost-cutting are often confronted with this dilemma, but there are no easy answers.

As a consequence, managers should prioritize service quality over low price while searching for an outsourcing partner.

How to Fix:

Managers may ensure that their augmented engineering staff is sufficiently prepared and competent to execute their jobs by researching and seeking feedback from prior clients.

Administration and communication:

Effective communication and management are critical to the success of any relationship. This is especially true when it comes to distributed teams and the work with remote employees. Your teams must maintain exceptional communication so that everyone feels connected and a part of the whole.

How to fix:

In small companies, a PM is often entrusted with full managerial duties. To ensure proper customer assistance service, major staffing companies have established management processes and best practice communication. Whatever kind of business you select, you should emphasize the following while establishing a new supplier relationship:

• Ensure that your staff augmentation services provider is keeping track of the project’s progress. Your project manager can take over the progress overview.
• Socialize with your remote coworkers as much as possible. Don’t limit your communication to regular status meetings. The more you contact remote colleagues, the better for your team.
• Adhere to a certain project management methodology. We recommend you to focus on scrum, since it gives you much flexibility, while enabling regular market-ready releases.

Location and culture:

The large distance between your core team and extended team might cause issues. Sometimes it’s about time zones, sometimes about the culture gap.

However, if these problems are appropriately addressed, cultural and temporal differences may be successfully controlled.

How to Fix:

Internal and extended teams must be synchronized, and meetings must be scheduled to overlap working time for different time zones. Proper project management includes regular communication concerning work and leisure, smart scheduling of meetings and clear agendas – the things that will help you successfully resolve upcoming location-related issues.

Transfer of knowledge through the project

New employees join your project team, some old employees quit, and this process is repeating all the time. It’s not a problem until you manage to properly organize the knowledge transfer process in your organization.

Knowledge transfer is essential at every stage of the project, from start to finish: at the outset, throughout implementation, and after the project is finished. The whole process can be harmed if there isn’t a thorough plan for collecting information and organizing the process itself.

How to Fix:

Choose a supplier that follows best practices for efficient knowledge transfer to ensure a smooth and secure sharing of information. Informal and spontaneous information transmissions may fail, while methodical, well-planned, and well-articulated information transfers succeed.

The new partner needs to learn as much as possible about the existing code, infrastructure, and product in general. Make sure that your existing team prepares clear project documentation. Also, presentations and recorded video calls with new employees may come in handy.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What positions can be filled with IT staff augmentation?

IT outsourcing agencies provide qualified and experienced IT specialists such as software engineers, quality assurance engineers, designers, project managers, DevOps engineers to fulfill your needs.

What methods are being used to expand the number of employees?

Employee expansion is a technique of employing remote employees for a defined length of time to suit certain business needs. Subcontracting and integrating competent specialists into full-time teams enables companies to operate around the clock and overcome the talent gap at a cheap cost.

THE VERDICT

IT staff augmentation enables involvement of top talents from around the world at an affordable cost. Companies all around the world are increasingly using IT staff augmentation to accomplish their goals more quickly. If you are looking for a smart way to use available resources and achieve the best result – extend your team with remote employees.