Team/Staff augmentation is one of the most effective ways to scale your team quickly. As one of the most flexible outsourcing models, staff augmentation allows your business to hire specialists temporarily in order to improve your internal team’s working capacity.

By hiring highly qualified people ranging from QA engineers and project managers to business analysts and software developers, team augmentation allows organizations to bridge all gaps and loopholes in their projects with the help of skilled professionals.

In order to succeed with team/staff augmentation, you must understand it well. In this article, we will talk about the benefits of staff augmentation ways to deal with its challenges, and when it should be leveraged. Let’s begin.

What Are the Benefits of Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation offers several benefits to organizations, such as:

  • High Productivity Level

 With staff augmentation, the developers and professionals you hire are solely focused on your project instead of managing multiple projects at once. Hence, their attention levels are higher and they are following your organization’s vision thoroughly. As this motivates them more, their productivity levels increase.

  • IP Rights Security

When it comes to augmenting staff for your projects, there is no dispute over IP rights. It is very clear from the beginning of the project that all IP rights belong to you, hence they are secure and any disputes regarding it are eliminated.

  • Flexibility

Staff augmentation offers you flexibility in two aspects – access to the talent pool and replacing developers.

  1. Access to a Wider Talent Pool – You can leverage unique expertise with staff augmentation, as you can hire people who have more work experience and expertise than your internal teams. When you partner with a staff augmentation firm, you gain access to their talent pool of experts in diverse fields who would have been difficult to approach otherwise.
  2. Replacing Developers – You can always replace the people you hire if you aren’t satisfied with their work. Since you’re hiring them temporarily, this move is easier to make without worrying about any complications or monetary losses.
  • Cost Efficiency

A significant benefit of staff augmentation is its transparent cost structure. Without worrying about any hidden costs, you can leverage this model to fulfill your needs. The staff augmentation vendor you partner with is responsible for managing everything ranging from workstations to necessary facilities, in exchange for a fee for a package that covers all your requirements.

  • Your Offer Stands Out

Software engineers all around the world like to implement their expertise practically and have a say in the decision-making process of the product they’re working on. Staff augmentation gives them this opportunity, which is why when you look out for augmented employees instead of full-time ones, you reach a much more talented pool of workers.

  • Meet Tight Deadlines

Many times, internal teams lack the required agility to deal with sudden obstacles and meet tight deadlines. While they have clear roadmaps and well-defined plans, the lack of ability to deal with a sudden obstacle swiftly can lead to missed deadlines and unsatisfied clients.

With staff augmentation, the professionals you hire work at a faster pace and prioritize critical tasks. Also, their expertise helps them to figure out the potential obstacles that may surface down the road. So, they set deadlines accordingly so that they can provide high-quality outputs on time and without missing deadlines.

  • Scale Up and Down Quickly

Staff augmentation gives you the option to scale up and down quickly as per your requirements. When you want to build a new team to start a new project, hiring and onboarding procedures take a lot of time. However, with staff augmentation, you can find and hire new employees quickly and with minimal effort.

Not only will you be able to scale up quickly by hiring more talented resources, you’ll also be able to downsize easily once their job is done. This is something that’s not possible with full-time employees, as you’ll have to pay them salaries even if the purpose for which you hired them is fulfilled.

  • Faster and More Suitable Recruitment

Recruitment procedures take a lot of time, money, and effort. Organizations either have in-house recruitment teams or outsource recruitment tasks to external agencies. Either way, there are several challenges that come up which make these procedures lengthy and tedious, such as lack of resources, long waiting time, communication problems, long onboarding procedures, etc.

 

When you turn towards managed services for staff augmentation, you receive updated CVs of competent candidates who are available to begin working with your organization right away. You receive multiple options from which you choose the most suitable one and then hire them for work. As all communication is handled by the vendor, you just have to approve the candidates and then start working with them. So, while recruitment procedures take up to months to end successfully, staff augmentation allows you to begin work in a few days only.

Challenges of Staff Augmentation and Ways to Overcome Them.

Staff augmentation has several unparalleled advantages that make it a great way to extend your team. However, there are also a few challenges that surface when you move ahead with your staff augmentation process. Some of them are:

Challenge 1: Communication Concerns

Quality of communication is a well-known concern regarding all outsourcing strategies, including staff augmentation. When you hire people via staff augmentation, the quality of communication in terms of effectiveness and language plays an important role. As the augmented worker is most likely working remotely, the need for effective communication becomes direr. So, its lack can prove to be a significant roadblock for your organization.

Solution: To deal with this concern, you need to choose your staff augmentation vendor carefully. Smooth communication majorly depends on the experience of the service provider, as more experience brings more quality with it. By doing a thorough research and indulging in communication with the vendor before partnering with them, you will get a good idea about the quality of the communication you’ll receive eventually. Also, getting reviews from people helps a lot. Ask around in your network and take people’s personal reviews into account while choosing a staff augmentation partner. You can also visit trustworthy online portals like Clutch to read honest reviews and ratings to make a better decision.

Challenge 2: Different Time Zones

Many times, when you leverage staff augmentation, the people you hire are working in different time zones. Hence, cooperating with them becomes difficult, as your schedules don’t match at all.

Solution: Time zone differences can range from one/two-hour differences to 12-hour differences. However, in both cases, there are certain steps you can take to work seamlessly.

If the difference is only about two-five hours, it isn’t much of an issue, as you can coordinate meetings at the hours when both teams (your internal team and augmented team) are working. In case of massive differences, you can set up short daily meetings or weekly meetings where you meet at a time that works for both teams, even if it’s off-schedule for one of them. This way, you can regularly discuss your plans, tasks, etc.

Also, many staff augmentation vendors offer teams that work according to your preferred timings, even if there is a time zone difference. So, if the time zone difference is something you cannot adjust to, you can always partner with such vendors to make coordination with the augmented team easier.

Challenge 3: Inharmonious Expectations about the End Result of the Project

When you leverage staff augmentation, your staff is most likely distributed across several locations. Since all coordination and work is being done from remote locations, you can expect a good number of misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. However, when these mismatched expectations pertain to the end product of the project, it can prove to be catastrophic.

Solution: There are two steps that you can take to avoid inharmonious expectations about the end results:

  • Formulate Appropriate Documentation: Before beginning the project, setting up detailed documentation about the course of action, preferred methodologies, expected features, non-negotiable requirements, NDAs, agreements, and deadline expectations must be done. Although it is understandable that you cannot predict and fix a course of action for projects, these documentations set up a clear path for what kind of actions the developers must take and how they should proceed with the project, so that the end results are not very different from what the client expects.
  • Set Up Effective Communication Channels: Seamless and effective communication channels help you to stay in touch with the augmented staff members constantly. This step helps out the other two challenges mentioned in this article as well. By setting up proper channels of communication, documenting conversations, and conducting regular meetings for progress updates and performance reviews, you can ensure that your project is on the right path. In case you find something wrong, you can ask your team to make the necessary changes before it gets too late.

When to Use a Staff Augmentation Model?

Staff augmentation offers several benefits and can be leveraged by businesses of any size across all industries. However, it is not necessary that your organization needs staff augmentation. It is important to evaluate your needs before using this model of outsourcing because it is not necessary that staff augmentation will be able to provide you with the solution that you’re looking for.

Keeping this in mind, staff augmentation can be a viable option for your business if you:

  • have to fulfill a temporary or short-term demand. For example, if you want to start a few projects but you don’t have a team readily available with you, you can leverage staff augmentation to either do the project for you completely or to start it up until you set up your internal team.
  • are in need of expert assistance. As we discussed earlier, staff augmentation offers you access to a wide pool of experts from diverse fields. If you are stuck and find yourself in need of some expert guidance, you can always leverage staff augmentation.
  • want to enhance your business strategy. With staff augmentation, you can enhance your services, decrease your time to market, develop MVP quickly, etc., all of which will affect your business positively.

While there can also be several other instances where staff augmentation may be the right choice for you, these purposes can positively be fulfilled by staff augmentation.

Conclusion

Staff augmentation offers several opportunities to organizations and a wide range of benefits as well. As we have discussed in this article, its benefits range from higher productivity of your internal teams and cost savings to rapid scaling and faster recruitment. When these benefits are combined with a well-structured staff augmentation strategy, outstanding results can be achieved and exceptional services can be delivered.

Like every outsourcing strategy, staff augmentation has its own set of challenges too. However, these challenges can be resolved effectively by taking a few simple steps. It is important to understand that organizations must not ignore these challenges, as they can cost them a lot of money, time, and effort if they surface at later stages of the process.

Staff augmentation has the ability to boost an organization’s overall functioning and increase its profit margins. However, it depends on how the organization leverages it. By carefully dealing with the challenges, formulating a well-structured strategy, and partnering with a competent partner, organizations can succeed with staff augmentation seamlessly.