In case of an inconvenience during your project or to improve the performance of your team, you can count on staff augmentation to be closer to your established objectives in certain time periods. This tool provides additional resources to quickly and efficiently save costs during active project development. According to the World Economic Forum 2018 report, between 1/2 and 2/3 of companies are likely to use outsourcing services that include temporary employees and freelancers as ad-hoc resources to provide the services they need.
This practice focuses on needing resources to move forward and adding value when goals and objectives are achieved. By knowing what staff augmentation is and what it can provide you in managed services IT, you will overcome software deadlines and beyond.
What is Staff Augmentation?
Basically, staff augmentation relies on the temporary hiring of personnel to boost the capacity of the business or organization during specific times to meet certain goals, objectives, and demands. This solution is based on a short-term job operations scheme. This is paid for by offering skills to save time and budget in contrast to full-time hiring, which does not necessarily provide you with assets to solve inconveniences.
Unlike a more focused managed services IT approach defined by quality, staff augmentation services provide inputs to meet what is needed to get the project to the final stages. However, this does not mean that your project will not have quality. On fact, you can handle this according to your priorities and requirements.
Types of Staff Augmentation and Staff Augmentation Services
In general terms, staff augmentation you can use, principally, to increase the capacity for seasonal demand or production peaks to meet goals that are already being met. It is also a support resource that builds capacity when it comes to hiring a permanent team and finding specialized skills to assign to tasks or projects. In terms of competitiveness, staff augmentation offers speed, adaptability, and agility to address market challenges.
In fact, within the staffing industry, outsourcing has become a more common modality. A Statista report showed that the global outsourcing market grew from $92.5bn prior to the COVID-19 to $132.9bn during the pandemic.
Traditional Staffing
The principal characteristic is that a skill commodity is a temporary project, which is normally non-critical because highly skilled people can be difficult to find. This resource is useful for projects of different lengths.
Master Vendor Staffing
This type of staff augmentation relies on long-term programs that are highly commoditized. So the focus is on low-cost scalability based on a single vendor. While the hiring will occur quickly, the impact will be massive. However, we don’t recommend you this strategy for more specialized tasks or projects.
Specialized Staffing and Consulting
By offering highly specialized skills, small consulting firms provide quality-talented staff for projects of a different scope. The con, in this case, is that hiring can be costly. But these firms and/or agencies typically save you time and mishaps. In this case, the goal of the hiring is to meet an exclusive need.
Gig Platforms
Remote work modalities across Internet platforms are very common today and provide a certain speed and flexibility. This type of staff augmentation service is based on task needs provided through commoditized skills. However, it takes time to find talent and specialized profiles beyond an already exposed curriculum. In contrast, geographic locations gain weight when considering established work dynamics. In terms of scope, it is preferable to set projects in terms of defined periods of time.
On-Demand Talent Platforms
By also hiring on online platforms, skilled workers are easy to find because quality is their top priority. Alongside speed, this resource offers solutions for highly specialized projects while saving on costs. The geography and remote modality considerations can also play into the pros and cons of project management.
Direct Independent Relationships
Businesses engage independent contractors to fill specialized skill requirements based on expert professional experience. Despite this quality, active working relationships, especially with individuals, can be hard to consolidate because the hiring focuses on knowledge over costs related to teamwork flow. Thus, this type of staff augmentation should be used for simple tasks, rather than for complex projects.
You might be interested in our blog post Tips to Consider Before you Hire a Web Developer.
How and Why Implement Staff Augmentation?
Depending on the scope of the project and its requirements, you can consider a mix of staff augmentation services or just choosing one of them as a management leader. This relies on defining priorities regarding budget, project length, and the need for skills based on the knowledge, experience, and size of the workforce.
Thus, you need to weigh the pros and cons of the mentioned models before making your final decision. Additionally, you should consider giving some context to your recently hired staff in order to get better results. A Forbes article says that creating processes that help outsourcing staff or freelances to quickly get up to business processes, culture and expectations will increase productivity.
If you need to meet deadlines, then staff augmentation and its benefits will provide you with an adaptable team in quick time vs. managed services IT.
What Benefits You Can Expect from Staff Augmentation
Besides meeting deadlines and demands, staff augmentation will offer you the chance to work with a more skilled team and add expert technical resources to your project. This will be significant for small businesses that need expansion but can’t afford to invest in full-time resources. In the end, you will find cost savings in training, recruitment, and operations.
Other challenges during ongoing projects include staff augmentation services that will provide you with more resources to manage unforeseen situations in a better manner. Additionally, this staff member could give you a new project outlook to refresh it and, furthermore, provide new insights.
For other purposes, especially if you are looking to grow your business in the short-term, you could use what is staffing augmentation as a trial tool to identify full-time staff. You can also use it find larger talent that currently is not available due to lack of budgets or risks of assuming new challenges in an ongoing project. Finally, it’s important that you know that staff augmentation is not recommendable for long-term projects. Depending on the case, instead, it’s preferable to hiring a full-time team.
If you are looking for outside support to implement this strategy, Advancio is the best option. Do your staff augmentation with us and have an ally to invest your attention in for other project requirements.
