How To Increase Software Team Productivity With Staff Augmentation

With the expansion of the outsourcing industry, many contracted companies that offer these services have been raising the skill level of their agents to meet even the most technical or industry-specific needs. This has led to it no longer being seen as a decline in quality to use outside workers. One of the largest sectors seeing these advancements is IT staff augmentation.

While implementing IT or software augmentation can seem like extra work, it has become one of the easier tasks when forming a software team or tackling a project that utilizes unfamiliar technology.

The process starts with consultations to uncover the root processes and skills needed for your project or development roadmap to succeed. Comparing these findings to your current staff will reveal areas not covered by existing knowledge silos. All companies should take a custom-tailored approach to codebase and contribution auditing, which provides you with a deep dive into the quality of your existing software assets as well as the efficiency of engineering processes.

A qualified provider has handled projects of all sizes with varying levels of involvement, from complete control over the project lifecycle to completing specific tasks off-site to complement your existing team. Part of each consultation takes a look at your staffing infrastructure, searching for the largest areas of opportunity to maximize return on investment.

While software staff augmentation is a large portion of cutting costs, bringing on the services of a fractional CTO sets you up for long-term success and growth.

While still a staff augmentation, a fractional CTO goes a step further by working directly with business owners and high-level teams. Working as a team, the CTO helps you find the needs that must be met for your product to succeed. Your company gets access to marketplace insights known only to those who have spent considerable time in the industry.

This extra perspective can take the stress off of founders who aren’t as tech-savvy as they are business-wise. Not only can this help perfect your product for the market, but the analysis done will help determine how to best structure your workforce going forward. This doesn’t mean pushing IT staff augmentation on you, however; it means finding the most cost-effective path to your goals, even if that means using your existing teams instead of outsourcing.

Promoting success within your software teams is the main goal for software executives. Higher quality services will beat bottom-dollar deals every time in terms of ROI and the satisfaction of working together. Achieving this may mean moving away from offshore software companies and settings sights nearshore.

Nearshore companies can ease the transition of bringing on new staff from a third party. It’s understandable that some teams are hesitant to begin working with someone they view as an outsider. To overcome this, consider a provider that is headquartered in the United States to lessen any cultural differences and communication problems that become even more apparent in a collaborative setting.

By employing experts throughout the U.S., for instance, your teams can also communicate in the same time zones. This keeps work during business hours and removes the headache of language barriers during an already stressful process.

Keeping a full-time team can take a toll on profit, labor and sometimes sanity, depending on the team. Staff augmentation removes the need for training new hires, onboarding and HR processing, health coverage and employee retention efforts. It also lends itself to more scalability, as you can access the exact specialists you need, when you need them.