Staff Augmentation | When is it Right for You?

In recent years, our stakeholders have had a particular shift in needs. They once required us to provide a fully dedicated team for their projects, needing guidance to help them achieve their goals. Now they require more control, having a clear objective and route in mind. No worries. We’re perfectly capable of delivering a service that brings you that level of control, with Staff Augmentation!

What is Staff Augmentation?

Staff Augmentation is a form of outsourcing, usually with a more specific and narrow scope than most other forms of outsourcing. Outsourcers use this method when they need their team to meet spikes in demands or complete specific tasks and projects within a specific timeframe.

Differences Between Managed Services and Staff Augmentation

Costs and Responsibilities

As mentioned before, the scope is more narrow when using a Staff Augmentation model in comparison to a Dedicated Team. This also applies to the responsibilities and where they reside. The vendor only looks for and presents potential hires to the client, who takes care of the rest.

This makes Staff Augmentation a more cost-effective model when hiring resources for a limited amount of time. However, it can become costly if projects have a long-term scope in mind, with developers coming and going as new projects come in.

Stability

We’ve said before that developers can come and go, because your short-term needs can change in the blink of an eye. Understanding this when considering using Staff Augmentation is crucial. A project that requires full understanding of your business objectives and your project can be hindered by this model. This, through developing a dependency on a specific developer, only for them to be reassigned to another project, or leave altogether.

For these cases, Dedicated Software Development teams are a better fit. Full immersion and greater investment in a project’s success become possible. All thanks to a broader scope in terms of service and involvement in said project.

Project Management and Business Relationships

They are as quick and easy as the model itself is. Quickly allocating engineers to different projects and attend to different needs at any given time is made easy. This, because dedication and scope are limited to a time, per project or resource basis. This is particularly useful if your business processes experience spikes in different areas, and require seasonal support.

One thing to keep in mind is that, because of its seasonality, the outsourcer needs to be more hands-on in the introduction of the business and the onboarding process, while also making sure that the project doesn’t come to a complete halt because of it. As previously mentioned, there is more responsibility in the hands of the outsourcer with this method.

Is This Model Right for You?

The one thing to ask yourself before committing to Staff Augmentation is what you’re looking for. If your project received an influx of new users and you need extra hands to accommodate the spike, want to launch a new product quickly to have an edge over your competitors, or you may not be sure if you want to fully commit to a dedicated team and want to test the waters beforehand, Staff Augmentation is a quick and straightforward method to meet your needs.