IT Staff Augmentation: understanding, defining pros and cons, comparison to other outstaffing models

What is Staff Augmentation in IT?

Every project has its own ups and downs in the matter of scale and productivity. But how do you hire a team with the skills to meet the high demand without leaving it untapped the rest of the time?
The best thing you can do is to take advantage of the IT staff augmentation service to ensure that your staff is perfectly balanced with your work rate.
IT Staff Augmentation is a proven staffing model. It is a way to complement the internal team with an outside talent to increase the organization’s potential and save the expenses for recruiting and infrastructure. You can choose any discipline required at any stage of the project and as long as you need. You can be sure that the people joining your team will be able to get to work immediately and achieve more results with minimal intervention.

Understanding Staff Augmentation: Pros and Cons

IT staff augmentation increases the staff capacity of the organization with highly qualified temporary workers or contractors with the required skills to address rapid technology expansion. These short-term commitments are usually filled through a staffing agency or an online talent platform.
Although staff augmentation runs smoothly for many companies, as with any organizational recruitment strategy, there are benefits and drawbacks. Awareness of the pros and cons helps enterprises adopt the staffing strategy that best works in their company.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation offers an adaptable, creative solution to grow resources within an existing team for better short-term capacity. It also provides a quick way to attract talents that fill the skills gap without long-term employment commitments. But there are other benefits, including intangible benefits, such as keeping internal teams focused on production and results, rather than worrying about new employees with more skills to replace them. Here are some advantages of staff augmentation.

• Expertise. Staff augmentation can be a perfect solution when a project needs the right skills which your current company does not possess.
• Rapid scaling of personnel up or down. When we travel in uncharted waters of a global pandemic, the ability to scale resources quickly and efficiently in any direction on demand is an important asset. Staff augmentation helps add assets when and where they are required, and it eventually enables a company to rapidly scale down when it is needed with less effect on direct hires.
• Savings in overhead costs. Depending on the variables, it is computed that staff with a full suite of benefits usually cost between 1.25 and 1.4 times the salary. The use of temporary resources by staff augmentation allows the company to avoid certain long-term costs and overheads.
• Staff flexibility. Staff augmentation typically simplifies adding to an existing team more quickly and effectively. As soon as a recruitment agency or an online talent platform provider understands the company’s needs, they can choose from a portfolio of contractors and select the most appropriate ones. Staff augmentation also facilitates replacing people who are not suitable for work or company, or who are inefficient.
• Engaging on a trial basis. Sometimes it makes sense to hire a new staff member with the right skill set, especially if a short-term project becomes a long-term programme. Staff augmentation allows companies to test potential team members in the working environment to see if the need is sufficient to guarantee recruitment and determine whether a person is suitable before offering a permanent position.
• Internal acceptance. Staff members may feel threatened when a new permanent worker arrives, especially if he has the required skill set that meets the needs of an ongoing project or program. Staff augmentation that adds talent on a temporary basis may help to solve this problem.
• Reducing training costs. Hiring new employees directly requires the company’s time and resources. One of the goals of staff augmentation is to increase the existing workforce as smoothly as possible. The aim is to complement staff with people with different skills over a period of time, rather than to recruit and assimilate new staff.

Cons of Staff Augmentation

However, staff augmentation is not perfect for every scenario. It requires making adjustments and additions to in-house processes and tools compared to standardized processes developed for direct recruitment. In addition, problems may arise when staff augmentation becomes a model for longer-term projects, including higher costs and higher risks when service-level obligations are not fully defined.

• No institutional knowledge. Some projects call for a deep historical knowledge that only existing employees obtain. Some newcomers may need to be trained and ramped up, depending on the project.
• Management and Oversight. Any enlargement of the team and resources requires oversight and processes. This involves temporary workers added by staff augmentation service.
• Higher long-term labor costs. When using staff augmentation, the outsourcing company collects fees as well as rewards for talents. Thus, over time, offshore staff augmentation contractors may cost more than permanent staff performing the same function. In the short term, a reduction in recruitment or layoff costs may offset the increase in labour costs.
• Onboarding external talent. In general, onboarding of augmented staff takes less time and effort than it does for direct employees, but this is not nonexistent and some level may be required.

Types of Staff Augmentation Services

1. Short-Term Services. Companies require short-term services at a time of increased demand for staff or absence of internal teams for a certain period.
2. Long-Term Services. The long-term service model is more suitable for large projects that fill skill gaps that reduce transaction costs or undesirable internal recruitment processes.
3. Commodity. When you need a reliable workforce, but you don’t need a certain skill set.
4. Skill Based. When you need reliable workers to perform tasks that require no particular skill.
5. Highly Skilled. You need more advanced skills that can only be acquired through significant training and experience, which is also crucial. Here, a specialist is more important than the generalist.

Comparison with the Other Outstaffing Models

Why Choose MWDN?

At MWDN, we have many years of successfully completing and delivering software development projects to clients across the globe.

MWDN is a software outsourcing company providing quality software outsourcing services, catering to clients across the globe, for projects of any size and scope.

IT Staff augmentation is also known as Extended teams. If you want to know how to manage such teams and the principles of working, you can read our article WHAT’S NEW IN EXTENDED TEAMS IN 2021? HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY MANAGE AND CHOOSE RIGHT TOOLS REMOTE TEAMS.

MWDN managers will help you to save your time and money. We focus on the important stuff to let you forget about the headache of the recruitment process. With us, You can tap into global markets, check the most promising outsourcing destinations, engage in a few interviews, and get a pro-level team working on your project for just a fraction of the cost. IT staff augmentation teams from MWDN will be compliant with your corporate culture and seamlessly act as an extension of your in-house team.

Get in touch today to learn more about our services!
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