Today companies from all around the world are investing in their remote working structure and extending their teams by outsourcing or adopting staff augmentation to improve their businesses while working from home. Extending teams with offshore members is slowly becoming the new trend. 

The adoption of staff augmentation has increased drastically post pandemic, as its post-pandemic market value was estimated around USD 132.9 Billion. The statistics are proof of how the world is considering staff augmentation as an advantageous step towards functioning efficiently in the pandemic. However, just like everything else, this marvelous practice comes with its own set of challenges as well. In this article, we are going to highlight five such challenges and discuss their solutions.

1. Poor Communication

Effective communication is a key element in ensuring success of any new practice in an organization. Especially as staff augmentation involves working with offshore staff, it is imperative to have effective communication because the consequences of poor communication can be ghastly.

Solution: Developing an effective communication plan is the solution to solve the poor communication challenge that comes with staff augmentation. A solid plan for effective communication must include:

  • Use of communication and collaboration tools for clear communication and management, such as Jira, Slack, Zoom, Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Github, etc. 
  • Performing regular reviews
  • Conducting regular virtual socializing sessions
  • Use of agile methodologies like Scrum, etc.  

2. Compromising Quality of Service

One of the biggest challenges which companies face while investing in staff augmentation is the inability of the staff to meet their standards. Poor quality of service can lead to missed deadlines, incorrect code, project delays, etc. 

Solution: Companies can ensure that they don’t receive poor services from their offshore staff by doing a thorough background check, such as checking their experience, looking at their past work, assessing their skills. Setting up a well-researched and well-structured evaluation index to evaluate all potential offshore staff members can help organizations to ensure that their quality of service won’t be compromised. 

3. Incoherent Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer is an essential step to take at every stage of the project. Whether it is the beginning phase or the implementation phase, it is imperative to ensure that seamless knowledge transfer is taking place. However, with staff augmentation, usually the process of effective knowledge transfer becomes more tedious to carry out. As a result, the risk of organizational waste and incoherent knowledge transfer increases.  

Solution: Organizations can ensure seamless knowledge transfer by:

  • Forming a well-planned and methodical knowledge transfer strategy
  • Clearly defining which information has to be transferred at specific stages
  • Ensuring all tech documentation is complete and clear
  • Dividing up the responsibilities for knowledge transfer at different stages of the process
  • Conducting regular Q&A sessions
  • Organizing all necessary meetings and verifying all information timely

4. Conflicting and Unclear Expectations

Conflicting and unclear expectations are very common for companies when they invest in staff augmentation, simply because the main team and the augmented staff have a different understanding of what the end product is supposed to look like. This can lead to delayed deadlines, extra costs, more time investments and unwanted conflicts.

Solution: To avoid conflicting and unclear expectations, companies can:

  • Invest in clear communication strategies
  • Provide well-structured documents to the augmented staff about all requirements and ideas
  • Conduct regular review sessions to know that the project is progressing in the right direction

5. Security Threats

As staff augmentation implies hiring a third party and involving them in internal procedures, security threat is a major challenge. The security and privacy of clients and their projects is critical and must not be compromised.

Solution: To resolve the challenge of security threats and risks, organizations must perform regular security audits and to maintain complete confidentiality they must follow all procedures of getting NDA signed after hiring the augmented team.

Staff augmentation helps companies to scale their business and wrap up complex projects quickly, without committing for a long term. It acts as an amazing resource to avail all sorts of benefits like faster time to market, reduced costs, enhanced innovation, speedy procedures and reduced workloads. However, it is important to ensure that all its challenges are effectively resolved as well, so that its numerous benefits can be enjoyed without any troubles. For all staff augmentation services please feel free to write to our experts at info@arrowcore.com