Outsourcing Has Evolved Into Staff Augmentation Model

With the expansion of the outsourcing industry, many contracted augmentation service firms have been raising the skill level of their developers to meet  the most technical or industry-specific project. This has led to it no longer being seen as a decline in quality to hire outside workers. One of the largest sectors seeing these advancements is IT staff augmentation. Staff augmentation isn’t exactly outsourcing however, while they are commonly compared, it’s important to understand the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing.

While implementing augmentation services can seem like extra work, it has become one of the easier tasks when forming a development team or tackling a project that utilizes unfamiliar software. Please click if you’re interested in a more in-depth definition of the staff augmentation meaning.

Understanding How Software Augmentation Works

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 process of staffing will reveal areas not covered by existing in-house team member. Sonatafy has also created a tailored approach to codebase and contribution auditing, giving you a deep dive into the quality of your existing software development assets as well as the efficiency of engineering processes.

Our in-house team uses decades of experience in software, web, mobile and cloud development to match you with augmented subject matter experts who can help bring your ideas to fruition. This coverage means no weak links in the chain of your project, keeping quality consistent during the entire user experience.

Staff Augmentation Benefits: Providing More Than Just Technical Knowledge

Sonatafy’s staff or team augmentation model has handled development 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 in-house team. An important part of each augmentation services consultation is taking a look at your staffing models, searching for the largest areas of opportunity to maximize return on investment.

Sonatafy’s over 100 years of combined development and project management experience is thanks in part to the augmentation benefits it has provided its clients. While build an augmented team of developers is largely a portion of cutting costs, bringing on the services of a staff augmentation provider sets you up for long-term success and growth.

In addition to expertise we offer, LinkedIn puts it best (2),

“It provides flexibility for professionals and offers a win-win situation for all parties concerned. Moreover, this closes the skills gap between demand and supply. As a result, this enables on-the-go recruiting, which benefits both businesses and individuals.”

-LinkedIn

Pair Your Staff Augmentation Services With A Fractional CTO

While still considered augmentation services, a fractional CTO goes a step further by working directly with business owners and high-level staff. Working as a team, the CTO helps you find the needs that must be met for your product or project 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 that aren’t as tech savvy as they are business-wise. Not only will this help perfect your project for the market, but the analysis done will help determine how to best structure your augmented and in-house team moving 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 staff instead of outsourcing.

Staff Augmentation Model: Strong Approaches With the Right Touch

Promoting success within your in-house team is the number one goal for Sonatafy. We believe that higher quality augmentation 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 developers and settings sights nearshore.

Nearshore companies can ease the transition of bringing on new staff from a third party. It’s understandable that your current in-house team is hesitant to begin working on a project with developers or engineers they view as outsiders. To overcome this, Sonatafy is based in the United States to lessen any cultural differences and communication problems that become even more apparent in a collaborative setting.

By employing expert developers throughout the United States and Latin America, your augmented and in-house team can communicate in the same time zones and in fluent English. This keeps work during business hours and removes the headache of language barriers during an already complex project.

Let Staff Augmentation Help You Succeed

Keeping a full-time team of developers can take a toll on profit, labor, and sometimes sanity, depending on the staff. Using project outsourcing, staff 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 as you need them. Need more than just a specific role? Learn how a full augmented team can benefit your business even further.

With full-service consultation, the staff augmentation model, Sonatafy is fully equipped to provide the exact help you need. Skip the wanted ads and recruitment funnels that can result in unhappy employees or misrepresented skill sets getting through the door. Bring your augmented based staff nearshore today.

Understanding the Staff Augmentation Model for Software Projects

In the United States and the world as a whole, there’s a shortage of trained, experienced IT professionals. Up until recently, firms have attempted to rectify their labor shortages via competitive wages and generous benefits, but there’s a limit to how much a business can spend. It also takes as much as four to five weeks to fill vacancies within the IT field. In the modern world of dynamic, agile development, this alone is a serious liability. Fortunately, IT staff augmentation can answer all of these problems and more.

What Is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation is essentially a service that many agencies offer as a midway point between full outsourcing and in-house development. In many cases, a firm may need additional talent that the traditional hiring process can’t readily provide. Perhaps it needs short-term help or urgent help to meet a tight deadline. Under a staff augmentation model, a business can immediately hire proven experts through these agencies in a matter of days or even hours.

A term you may hear interchangeably with staff augmentation is resource augmentation, they are similar but not exactly the same. To find out more about resource augmentation, click the text above.

Staff Augmentation Benefits and Advantages

Staff augmentation companies work to cultivate great talent to prove their utility to the firms that represent prospective customers. With the help of such an agency, you can immediately access the record of their workers and hire quickly, thanks to the confidence they provide. On the off chance that you find someone isn’t a good fit, you’ll typically be able to replace them with another worker from the same agency in no time.

Of course, flexibility and skill come with considerable costs. When IT specialists work short-term staff augmentation jobs, they’re in a position to command the best pay rates in the industry. Progression towards remote teams that don’t work from the same office means that staff augmentation often combines premium quality and bargain costs by tapping overseas talent. However, offshoring for staff augmentation can run into key problems.

We’ve done further research into the benefits of staff augmentation in another article that can be found be clicking the blue text.

Offshore Augmentation Problems

Common staff augmentation challenges include inefficient communication, opposite working time zones, and incompatible workplace cultures are extremely important in the high-speed world of IT. If you’re interested in full offshore outsourcing, there are many brilliant staff augmentation software teams to hire for a project.

Staff augmentation isn’t the only option but it’s one we highly recommend when trying to fill gaps within your staff. Here you will find more information regarding other outsource staffing methods to use for your business.

However, attempting to tap offshore talent from the other side of the globe for your company may run into a variety of problems. In many ways, you may find yourself dealing with the disadvantages of both onshore and offshore labor as well as unique issues with coordination and communication. Fortunately, there is a solution: nearshore staff augmentation (3).

Nearshore Staff Augmentation: The Perfect IT Solution

When you compare an office in New York to a facility in Bangladesh, the time zones are 10 hours apart. By the time your team in the US stops working, your extra team members won’t have even started — not unless you intend to compromise their performance by requiring night shifts. This is why for integrated staff augmentation benefits; you should look to nearshoring locations such as Mexico and Latin America.

While Latin America has higher wages for IT experts than distant offshore locations, it also shares time zones with the United States. Furthermore, Latin American nations usually have workplace cultures that are similar to what’s common in the United States. As such, you’re able to save money compared to hiring US IT talent, while achieving similar or better performance. Even while targeting the top programming talent in Latin America and offering the best wages for the local market, you can still save tens of thousands of dollars on annual salaries. Not to mention, you can also enjoy the innate flexibility, responsiveness and dynamism of the staff augmentation model.

Click the following for specific strategic outsourcing ideas you can implement in your business.

Learn More

Sonatafy is a top resource for nearshore IT talent and staff augmentation services. If you’re interested in learning more about how IT staff augmentation can help you, you’re in the right place. Get in touch to find out how staff augmentation might benefit your business.

Q&A

What is considered staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is the use of outside personnel to augment the capacity of your organization. Many companies utilize Sonatafy Technology for staff augmentation for highly skilled resources to augment  their software development teams. Staff augmentation is commonly mistaken for business consulting but these 2 services are quite different. One focuses on a defined role, while the other assists in the building process.

What is the difference between staff augmentation and managed services?

Finding and hiring in house software talent can be time consuming, challenging and very costly. The primary IT outsourcing models are Staff Augmentation and Managed Services. When comparing staff augmentation vs managed services, staff augmentation is often used for specific tasks and functions such as adding software engineers to your existing software development team. While managed Services typically consists of outsourcing the entire function to another party. An example of managed services would be to outsource your entire software development for your company vs keeping your inhouse team.   

Why is staff augmentation important?

Staff Augmentation is considered one of the most important options for IT and Software teams to stay agile in a rapidly changing environment.  Staff Augmentation offers an organization the ability to expand their existing talent with remote teams around the world.  Hiring and retaining skilled IT resources has always been a challenge for companies based on the high demand for these resources. Staff Augmentation helps a company be ready for projects and expand their capabilities beyond their in-house staff.

How does it work?

Staff augmentation/business augmentation is a flexible outsourcing strategy used to respond to a company need or objective where highly skilled talent is needed to augment your existing team. Staff augmentation consists of blending your internal team with augmented resources that bring additional skills and capabilities to your team. Many software teams have deadlines and strict budgets that would be unachievable if they did not utilize staff augmentation to help their existing resources and expand their capabilities.  

What is the difference between Dedicated Teams vs Staff Augmentation?

Dedicated software development teams is an outsourcing model where clients work with a full team software development team on an ongoing basis. The Dedicated teams typically include the following roles:

• Scrum Master / Project Manager
• Business Analyst
• Frontend Developer
• Backend Developer
• Quality Assurance Engineer
• DevOps Engineer

Staff Augmentation is an outsourcing model where clients augment specific roles on their software development team vs. outsourcing an entire team.  

What are the advantages and disadvantages of staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is a form of IT outsourcing which allows organizations to add team members to fill skill gaps to support their IT projects. While outsourcing model is mainly a benefit to its users, there are some pros and cons of staff augmentation to be aware of. 

Advantages of staff augmentation:

• Ability to use external and internal IT resources
• Increased access to skilled talent
• Quickly scall personnel up or done
• Reduced cost from hiring resources directly
• More control over the project and its resources
• Trail basis for resources to ensure fit into your organization

Disadvantages of staff augmentation:

• Increased oversight and management
• Can require more training for new resources to integrated into your company
• Lack of internal institutional knowledge on software, company, processes etc.
• Reliance on internal process which could be a bottleneck to completing your project

References:

1. A Practical Guide to Staff Augmentation and Outsourcing
   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1201/1078/43194.18.1.20010101/31268.10?cookieSet=1
2. “It provides flexibility for professionals and offers a win-win situation for all parties concerned. Moreover, this closes the skills gap between demand and supply. As a result, this enables on-the-go recruiting, which benefits both businesses and individuals.” – LinkedIn Quote
   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-your-business-needs-staff-augmentation-services-ajay-bhoraskar
3. Staff Augmentation Wikipedia
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_augmentation