What is Staff Augmentation? Everything You Need to Know for Your Business

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Introduction

Staff augmentation is more than a buzzword– it is a game-changing strategy that reshapes business growth success. According to a survey, businesses worldwide will spend $81.87 billion on staff augmentation by 2025.

But what is staff augmentation? Why should you opt for it for your project, and how will it impact your business? Let’s discuss everything you should know about it—types, benefits, differences, future use cases, and how it works.

What Is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation uses outside experts and specialists temporarily to augment one’s organizational capabilities and manage your team. It is an outsourcing and flexible strategy where you can hire dedicated developers to fill gaps to achieve particular goals and objectives.

You can choose developers based on their skills for short—or long-term cooperation with a client and extend your augmented team whenever you need to. For instance, you may need a skilled person to fulfill the tasks or want to speed up the process by adding more resources along with your full-time employees.

Why is Staff Augmentation Necessary?

Before delving into staff augmentation approaches, let’s understand why it is necessary or why an organization chooses to use staff augmentation within its projects.

• Address skill gap: Staff augmentation fills the skill gap and acts as a bridge between skilled professionals and the organization. It is crucial for business growth because a report by Harvey Nash Group found that 67% of tech leaders acknowledge a tech talent shortage.
• Cost-effectiveness: Staff augmentation allows businesses to acquire experts with knowledge and experience proficiency, making it cost-efficient. According to a survey, implementing augmented IT staff can help to save 70% of costs in several cases.

Types of Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation is a broader term that is not simply limited to outsourcing teams. It can be a game-changer and strategically utilized to boost productivity. The following are the various types of staff augmentations, which may vary in different business sizes.

1. Skilled-specific

Several companies wanted a team that fulfilled the projects’ specific skill needs. This staff augmentation type provides a team of experts with specific skills and expertise that can help accomplish the particular objectives. In simple words, they fulfill the skill gap to address particular issues within the existing workforce.

2. Project-based/Short-term

It offers experts or teams for particular projects. It is ideal for short-term goals because it helps to add IT professionals to determine a specific project duration. The plus point is that it enhances your project with temporary proficiency and spikes the workload with specialized tasks.

3. Onshore and Offshore Staff

Onshore staff augmentation involves hiring professionals within the same country. Meanwhile, offshore staff augmentation indicates adding experts from different countries. Both approaches help access a pool of talents and add extra resources for project accomplishment and enhancement.

4. Remote Staff

This approach is to include more resources into the existing projects. Depending on the company’s business requirements, it can be onshore or offshore. Among types of staff augmentation, remote teams are flexible and assist in improving workflow, scalability, and managing complex tasks efficiently.

5. Dedicated Team

This model refers to professionals who work executively for your organization. It could be remote or onshore; it assists existing teams in upscaling their work pace and focusing on crucial activities. In this staff augmentation, the task duration increases and becomes an extension of your in-house team.

6. Hybrid Staff Augmentation

As the name suggests, hybrid staff augmentation involves combining two or more approaches to meet different requirements. One example is integrating remote teams with onshore staff for rapid development and optimization.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation in Business

Staff augmentation provides numerous benefits for businesses. Organizations can streamline operations, save costs, and increase flexibility by including additional skilled resources. Let’s delve into the crucial advantages of resources and staff augmentation.

Fill the Skill Gap

With the extensive advantages of IT staff augmentation in business, filling the skill gap will be the foremost reason. Hiring an experienced professional can fill the void of your existing workflow’s technical or niche experts.

Moreover, this brings specialized knowledge and experience to your internal team. In addition, it also ensures that projects are executed with the highest proficiency level and decreases skill shortages.

Flexibility and Scalability

Acquiring an IT staff augmented team provides flexibility and scalability as they help you to address technical and functional problems. Whether your project scales up or down, the augmented team can streamline your business operations and improve the overall efficiency and productivity.

Furthermore, this approach is more beneficial during peak workloads, sudden project requirements, and seasonal demands. From short-term projects to slower periods, staff augmentation offers agility to adapt to shifting needs.

Cost Optimization

Cost management is critical for any business, and staff augmentation can add value to it. Also, it is quite cost-saving and less expensive than hiring full-time employees, such as salaries, training costs, and insurance expenses.

With proficient team staff augmented you can optimize costs by paying only for particular expertise and project durations. As a result, the approach eliminates unnecessary overhead and provides access to cost-efficient professionals for diverse projects.

Rapid Implementation

Onboarding new IT professionals for the internal team can be time-consuming and require a lot of effort to accomplish until everyone is on the same page. However, staff augmentation offers the benefit of implementing and achieving the project goal rapidly with high expertise and adaptability.

Furthermore, experience proficiency minimizes delay and provides top-tier solutions. It helps to meet the shortest deadlines and respond efficiently to business needs.

More Productivity

With the additional workforce, you can boost your work by 2x times. Getting help from additional resources in IT staff augmentation improves your work productivity and efficiency. The augmented staff can ensure specific tasks are completed on time and help in-house team members focus on core goals and strategies.

In addition, they also ensure that the project is handled best by streamlining the process and assisting in delivering dynamic outcomes without stretching the workload unnecessarily.

Better Adaptability

The augmented staff are highly qualified professionals and skilled in their niche industry and products. Hence, they can easily manage complex challenges, new opportunities, and odd shifts to deliver the best result for your organization.

The outsourcing team can offer flexibility with advanced proficiency and evolve project requirements based on market conditions. The team can also create strategies for the organization that drive business growth seamlessly.

Challenges of Staff Augmentation

Like every coin has two sides, staff augmentation has a few challenges that may hamper your tasks. However, to prevent these hurdles, you can get an expert who is knowledgeable with their work.

• Management Overhead: Handling augmented staff and existing workflow can be time-consuming and take effort. Unless roles and responsibilities are clear, the management workload increases.
• Communication Barriers: Working in different time zones or work cultures can bring communication issues to the table. Moreover, collaboration becomes challenging and requires streamlined communication for appropriate workflow.
• Quality Issues: As the work style differs from that of the organization, meeting the standard can be a hurdle initially. You must monitor performance and provide a clear picture of the protocols and processes.
• Security Risks: Protecting sensitive and confidential data when working with external staff is critical. As a result, you need to conduct background checks and implement robust security measures to mitigate security matters.

Staffing Augmentation vs Other Staffing Services

Staff augmentation is one of the crucial strategies of businesses to fill the skill bridge among their ongoing or new projects. To understand its approach briefly, let’s compare it with other staff solutions.

Staff Augmentation vs Outsourcing

The core key difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing staff is control and responsibilities. In staff augmentation, you hire external resources with proficient skills to add value to your existing project.

In outsourcing, you hand over the entire project to another external provider. In IT staff augmentation vs outsourcing, both are scalable and cost-effective; however staff augmentation could be short-term or long-term. Meanwhile outsourcing could only be based on a certain required period.

Staff Augmentation vs Managed Services

Managed services and staff augmentation differ in terms of adding external resources to maintain IT infrastructure. The augmented staff is integrated with the internal team to meet project demand and can be determined based on IT requirements.

However, managed services is a subscription model that provides solutions by outsourcing IT infrastructure to a third-party service provider. It is chosen to relieve in-house professionals from daily operations and provide comprehensive support.

Staff Augmentation vs Full-time

Direct hiring of full-time employees and choosing staff augmentation for the project is a completely different approach. The augmented team is a temporary resource hired to fulfill the project goals with their extensive knowledge.

Meanwhile, a full-time employee is a permanent professional who joins a long-term workforce aligned with the organization’s standards and requirements. Coming to cost comparison, full-time professionals involve more expense than in-house recruitment.

Staff Augmentation vs Freelance

Another comparison is between popular staffing solutions, staff augmentation, and freelancing. Both are independent and work on the contracts; however, augmentation is longer than freelancing. A freelancer is recruited for a particular project or work, but an augmented staff is needed to fulfill the skill set.

Although a freelancer is an independent contractor, staff augmentation does not work with the existing team like it can. If you are looking for short-term project accomplishment, freelancing staffing is a good choice, but for long-term staff augmentation, staff augmentation wins the race.

Staff Augmentation vs Consulting

Last on the list of famous staffing solution comparisons is staff augmentation vs consulting. Both have different benefits, as the augmentation team works according to the guidance given, whereas consulting helps you with the guidance. Simply put, both staffing solutions have different solutions, roles, and responsibilities. So, choosing one among them will depend on your business requirements.

How Does Staff Augmentation Work

For IT staff augmentation, numerous companies follows three core steps to ease the hiring process and obtain successful outcomes.

1. Identification of the skill gap
At this stage of the ongoing project, the company determines the skill gap and opts for remote specialists on a contract basis for a specific time period instead of hiring a developer for a long time.

2. Onboarding of recruited staff
Once your choice of developer is hired, the next step is the onboarding process, which involves getting acquainted with the in-house team and integrating other team members into the project.

3. Nurturing of augmented staff
This stage involves continuous learning and developing new augmented IT staff to deliver exceptional value and expected results.

How to Choose Staff Augmentation for Your Business?

If you are unsure when to choose staff augmentation, here are the situations that indicate when you should select this model.

➡ You already have IT engineers developing your product from your state-of-the-art development center. Still, you are looking for an extended arm with a different skill set to develop the front-end or back-end of your project. Let’s say you have 2 ongoing projects; where for one project, you require 1 IT professional, and for another, you require a team of tech professionals, but due to the high cost of developers and shortage in the local market, you are helpless. This is where outsourcing can help you grow at your convenience without a burning hole in your pocket during challenging times.

➡ You are developing a cutting-edge digital product with a team of top-tier developers, and you are required to add new developers into your existing team, but the specific skills you are looking to hire is rare in your region, and you have to extend your search to other locations.

➡ You outsource your project to a software development company, but the progress and output are not expected, and it does not fit for several reasons. You want to directly access the developers who can work according to your vision and are equally motivated, just like in-house full-time employment.

Future Growth in Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation is not only gaining popularity currently, but will make a significant impact in the future as well. Following are the trends and impacts which indicates why staff augmentation is vital for businesses.

1. Demand for Specialized Advance Skills

As innovation and advanced technologies emerge among businesses, a specific skill set is required, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Cloud computing, and Cybersecurity.

Numerous companies have picked up the trend but seek outsourcing experts to meet their needs. This entails a broad approach to tailoring expertise for their existing projects. Moreover, niche recruitment will become a prevalent trend, enhancing the augmentation of staff’s future.

2. Global Workforce

After a thriving remote working culture, there will be a rise in the global workforce as it allows businesses to tap into an access pool of talents and demand specific skill sets from anywhere. This will expand the broad spectrum of skilled professionals and rapid project implementation.

It will also assist in adding new perspectives and innovative ideas to businesses. With global outreach, organizations can harness the potential of technical proficiency.

3. Boost Digital Presence

Staff augmentation promotes digital space where organizations can efficiently manage flexibility and agility. The augmented team will achieve a positive shift in the IT infrastructure and create a secure virtual workspace for employees, regardless of their geographical location.

However, it will shape the future of staff augmentation with reliable access, robust security, and increased use of automation tools for performance.

How to Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Company?

The following are the seven steps you should take into consideration to find the right staff augmentation partner:

1. Determine the skill gap.
2. Based on your project requirements, identify the type of services you need—long–term or short–term.
3. Offshore outsourcing is a globally favorable option; India and Ukraine are the popular names for opting for an offshore development company.
4. Determine the time zone difference, travel routes, and pocket-friendly rates.
5. Identify the best staff augmentation company validating their portfolio and development process. Give Agile software development special attention and importance.
6. Make sure to authenticate testimonials and references.
7. Sign an NDA

Conclusion

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why should you consider IT staff augmentation?

IT staff augmentation, or subcontracting, lets you primarily outsource manpower on a skill-requirement basis for a limited time. Staff augmentation is not only an ideal option but a viable choice for IT organizations looking for extra talent to scale quickly with a strategic vision. This model helps to fulfill the deadlines in the budgetary requirements

What are the common myths of resource and staff augmentation?

Here are some of the myths about It staff augmentation: It raises issues in communication, gives you no control over your project, is risky, and reduces quality work and efficiency.