Resource And Staff Augmentation: Trending Approach To Build Next-Gen Products In 2024

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Resource And Staff Augmentation To Enhance IT Capabilities

Today, we live in a digital world where we see continuous improvement and evolution when it comes to technology. Considering this, businesses in the 21st century need to comply with all the high-technological requirements of their clients if they wish to stay ahead of their competitors.

This competitive race strives for technological innovation where online presence plays a greater part. Eventually, organizations struggle to offer relevant applications and mobile and Web resources to personalize user experience, thus prioritizing customer satisfaction. The case is worse with Startups. Hence, the trend towards fulfilling the client’s online requirements is here to stay longer as technologies are turning even more advanced and sophisticated.

With this enters the concept of staff augmentation. What exactly does it mean? This question bothers a lot of managers and business owners as there has been a hype regarding staff augmentation for being the future of flexibility and cost-effective staff recruitment. However, is it so? Let’s discuss!

When implemented accurately, this outsourcing model (also known as resource augmentation model and staff augmentation model) assures real gains in rapid development project turnaround, team productivity, and cost savings at every stage of business functioning.

Staff Augmentation is a brilliant approach to outsourcing, assuming the staff recruitment for a strong project in line with the organization’s current staffing requirements and objectives. It focuses on in-house team expansion, thus assisting you in hiring specialists for quick project completion.

Simply put, suppose you are a startup, and you plan to build a mobile application for your online store, and you require at least 6 developers to complete the task. The problem arises when you realize your in-house team contains only 3 developers. Under such circumstances, you might think of urgent recruitment to find 3 more skilled programmers with the needed expertise.

All in all, this entire process may take up extra 1-2 months, which will do nothing but eventually delay the launch of your project besides stripping you off exceptional projected revenue.

In such a case, when you opt for staff augmentation, you get 3 exceptional developers in your team within 1-3 weeks. This further helps obtain a better and quicker product completion besides a swift market launch

The best part? After the application hits the market, you aren’t required to fire the programmers who put their hands on it. This way, startups avoid all the paperwork, legal, and documentation hassle of full-time and official employment besides the extra cost invested in hiring.

The Hiring Trend Of Staff Augmentation

Lately, Staff Augmentation is becoming quite popular. During the deadly COVID pandemic, the IT companies utilized the resource and staff augmentation model to its maximum potential.

In fact, under the Businesswire report, the market revenue of the worldwide software is forecasted to touch $968.25 billion by 2021 end. The below image from Statista predicts a radical revenue growth for the upcoming few years.

Considering the rate, it would have been impossible without many software experts and specialists. This further indicates that the global developer’s count is going to reach 28.7 million people. Staff augmentation is one such approach that assists in distributing a particular workforce between businesses.

Ideally, staff augmentation is an approach to hiring that offers a plethora of benefits to businesses. This happens due to the hiring speed of employer and their flexibility to add/remove developers from the augmented team. Such excellent flexibility is never really possible when it comes to in-house teams. Searching and hiring a new employee is quite lengthy. Alongside, it requires too much paperwork along with official registration. Firing staff also turns out to be burdensome. It reduces the overall value of in-house development, specifically when the new developers are required for a smaller duration eg. 6 months.

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After all the above discussion, you might have one question- why the augmented staff is an attractive and popular option for organizations of all scales and sizes. Well, below we have listed a few considerations that make resource and staff augmentation a hiking trend for companies.

• In-house hiring is highly expensive
• Staff turnover continues to rise today
• Tradeoffs between budget and quality turn poor
• Searching and hiring new staff involves too much time and effort
• It becomes hard to focus on real talent with complicated hiring practices

Staff Augmentation: Types

Now that you have a clear idea about resource and staff augmentation, it’s time to get a brief about the variety of its forms. In fact, staff augmentation comes in different types. Considering this, understanding which one of the forms you require is vital. Besides saving you time, resource and staff augmentation saves tons on the cost of staff recruitment as well. Below are 6 types of staff augmentation in use.

There are many Myths About IT Staff Augmentation spread in the market, which are incorrect. You must figure out the right thing to do and take your business to the higher frontier.

5 Reasons Why Startups Need Resource And Staff Augmentation

Resource and Staff Augmentation is all about a firm that specializes in an incredible skill set to complete a project. When Startups opt for staff augmentation, they achieve a number of benefits. Here is a list of 5 Reasons why Startups need staff augmentation.

1. Meets The Strict Deadlines

Generally, most development projects are carried out on an urgent basis. This further denotes that your company must meet the strict deadlines tagged along with it. As a result, companies fail to meet deadlines most of the time due to a lack of additional resources.

Among all, the worst part is that the hiring process takes around 20 to 25 days. This further indicates that you can lose an important project while finding a competent staff. With robust staff augmentation, businesses acquire breathing room. Consequently, they can easily align external teams to work on urgent projects. In addition, hiring managers will save time, resources, and energy spent in searching, hiring, and training skilled and qualified candidates for the job.

2. Cost-Efficient

If we speak about in-house staff, startups need to bear loads of overhead costs. These costs include paid wages, benefits, insurance, taxes, training, paying for management and supervision, etc. When startups opt for staff augmentation, it enables them to cut down the overhead costs of business. Companies can cut costs associated with several administrative functions. Furthermore, Startups don’t need to deal with unemployment as well.

3. Facilitates Specialized Skill Gap

An ideal staff augmentation is a team that owns all the expertise and skills that your business needs. Simply put, different projects call for different skills and experiences. Initially, startups might not hold particular expertise to bridge the skill gap. However, with staff augmentation, companies can gain innumerable benefits. Resource Augmentation model offers viable and innovative solutions to bridge all the skill gaps present in project teams.

4. You Have Full Control

Generally, if you see closely, you might feel that outsourcing your project development or services results in losing control over the development process. However, with staff augmentation, companies can retain entire control over every major determining factor of the project. Startups can decide on who will oversee the project, and they can set timeliness as well. Every activity takes place under your supervision and sets guidelines.

5. Flexibility

With resource and staff augmentation, IT hiring managers still have space to allot specialized teams around particular expertise, skills, products, and technologies for distinct deadlines and projects. It enables companies to respond to end contracts, make changes, and prioritize the room for growth. Startups get more flexibility in their work process with staff augmentation.

Sensitive Areas: Resource Augmentation Model Hurdles

Bear in mind that augmented services are a form of outsourcing. Hence, this approach holds several drawbacks when it comes to employment. Below are 3 major sensitive areas and hurdles concerning resource and staff augmentation that you need to look at.

1. Managerial hurdles

Staff Augmentation is all about outsourcing. In other terms, this denotes that your employees will not work in your office. Under such circumstances, it is important to establish an effective management and communication channel to keep the augmented staff and in-house team well-grounded and tuned with each other. Well-tuning facilitates effective project completion. If there are hurdles in management, the project process is more likely to turn cumbersome, error-prone, and inefficient for both teams, thus resulting in poor performance and solution.

• Training in-house staff:

Your in-house team must have prior training to manage your augmented staff. This practice will get your task management aptly organized. If the task streams are complicated and full of hassle, it may end in duplication of tasks, dispute of responsibilities and roles, and several other needless barriers to productivity.

2. Privacy risks

Outsourcing tasks call for a huge amount of trust. You need to forgo the entire privacy of your corporate information and data secured under privacy rules in your office. When it comes to efficient and flexible staff, security plays a huge role. The security and privacy of the client and project are significant and must not be risked.

Talking about staff augmentation, security is a prime concern. Staff augmentation business models involve interacting with a third party and incorporating them into their internal operations. Staff augmentation firms should take up frequent security audits to rectify the issue of security hazards and threats. Alongside, they should follow all the protocols for gaining NDAs signed after incorporating the augmentation staff to ensure total security.

3. Communication issues

Collaborating with a remote workforce is all about effective communication and brilliant management techniques. Thus, it is essential to establish a well-grounded communication channel to facilitate a smooth, easy, and robust workflow even if the work environment is distributed.

However, communication and management become a major challenge for a lot of in-house employees. Most of the time, clients face poor communication due to language barriers. Eventually, companies undergo misunderstandings during the project development due to an inferior level of English. On a good note, companies can avoid this problem by consulting directly with a company representative, checking in with the vendor’s English level, or communicating with every staff member.

Besides communication problems, another issue involves the time zone. However, you can control this issue by establishing a worthy meeting schedule that enables you to set up seamless communication.

Staff Augmentation Contract: Things To Consider

Once you decide to opt for a Software Development staff augmentation, the immediate next step you should consider is choosing the augmented model’s nature. Below are 3 major things that you need to consider before finalizing your staff augmentation model.

• Analyze the duration of your project. Check if it requires less than 6 months. In case it does, staff augmentation will be perfect for you. However, if your project duration exceeds for a longer period, you might need other models.

• Examine the sensitivity and intensity of data that you will require to disclose. It is always reasonable to sign an NDA for staff augmentation contract with all developers and vendors. Take time to look into all the risks involved in disclosing data.

• Determine all the costs of training involved.

Calculate the costs for three cases and compare:
1. When your in-house team collaborates with augmented staff
2. When you hire a dedicated team
3. When you outsource the entire project.

At times, staff augmentation might not deliver efficient results if management and several other factors are poor.

That said, an excellent strategy to avoid all the unseen troubles includes a valid agreement on staff augmentation with an NDA clause following the calculations of costs involved in it.

Conclusion