What is Staff Augmentation? The Miracle of Staff Augmentation Services

7 min read Dec 07, 2021

The industry's most significant trends include the rise in the hiring of contingent workers across the organizations. Not just this, it manifests itself as the extended working model. These are the practices that require the organization to temporarily fill the space when the existing ones are on vacation, illness, or other reasons.

“It is a dedicated service itself that works temporarily to work on the capacity of the firm.”

Let's understand the basics of Staff Augmentation Services

What is the Difference between Staff Augmentation Services and Managed Services?

Staff Augmentation Services

Undoubtedly, these two models work differently.

On one side, staff augmentation becomes necessary when it is about addressing short-term resource constraints, especially in cases of budgetary pressures and headcount limits. Such measures sit perfectly when skills are needed for the immediate or on short-term basis. All the required or, say, internal resource gaps can be fulfilled with the external resources, and on the completion of the project, it would be regarded as no long-term solution. Sometimes, the contracts proceed while redeploying the resource to another project. Therefore, there is high market growth in the staff augmentation due to several factors such as steadily declining rates, never-ending margin pressure, and rising corporate policies.

Managed Services

On the other side, the managed services look beyond the traditional outsourcing and hire short-term contractual staff to receive the long-term benefits. This model outsources the management, operations, and delivery of the processes effectively to lessen the business’s total cost. All the strategic initiatives would fall into place while increasing the note of efficiency and productivity.

Even when businesses are using the managed services model, staff augmentation is often used for a particular set of services and at a specific point of time. The staff augmentation services can show up as being the de facto operating model for the IT organization.

What Is The Difference Between Staff Augmentation And Outsourcing?

Staff Augmentation

Staff Augmentation would temporarily boost the team numbers with the staff that can be indulged throughout the phases or based on projects. It is one of the delivery approaches that can make you hold onto the competitive advantage.

The staff augmentation model makes it easier to identify and integrate external engineers into the internal team. It comes along with deep-seated cultural and technological differences, which is hard to align with the company's goals. There will be challenges, and you need to find the solution to fill the in-house skills gaps or project-related requirements.

Outsourcing

On the other hand, outsourcing differs from staff augmentation and has its own pros and cons. With outsourcing, you pay them for the particular outcome from the task or the project and share the risk factors with the outsourcing vendor. This may conclude to giving up direct control for specific business operations.

The IT outsourcing will recruit and align them with the tasks you've set for them to handle the development tasks. The particular set of members in the team will work separately from your firm and won’t be directly involved within the internal development activities.

We know very well how dedicatedly people are hiring skilled software developers, and the demand is growing higher and higher. Staff augmentation is the perfect choice over the set of managed services provided by the companies. Instead of making efforts in hiring a team, you may just go with hiring specialists offshore who will push the job forward.

It may get you the answer to fulfill your needs.

Why Is Staff Augmentation Important?

Staff Augmentation is the most crucial tool for the IT organization to stay agile in a volatile environment. It has become easier for people to work remotely on projects with technological advances and globalization. It is the new buzzword in the IT field, with businesses switching from in-house hiring to staff augmentation services.

It is a boon in the cases when:

  • The organization wants to extend the team and has a focus on another part of the project. 
  • The firms are looking to hire people with unique skillsets, at different locations. 
  • The organization wants to interact with the remote team regularly.

One could be benefitted from the staff augmentation services such as:

  • Saving an organization hassle of searching and recruiting the prospects of the business.
  • Saves the cost of the office space, equipment, taxes which is part of operation expenses.
  • Instant access to the experts from anywhere in the world.
  • Geographical and time flexible as teams can work in different time zones at different places.
  • Access to the best skills and talents needed for the specific project.
  • No more overheads and employment issues.
  • Chasing a deadline for a project becomes more leisurely.
  • Consigning the work according to the deliverables.

What Are The Types Of Staff Augmentation Services?

When it is about staff augmentation, it is important to know its different types as it can helps you hire based on the category.

Commodity:

This is where you need reliable workers to perform tasks for you without any specific skillset. It includes a primary factory or data warehouse, retail, events, and manual labor.

Skill-based:

Here, your business will need particular skillset like multi-lingual, typing, use of spreadsheets for the set of requirements, but the level of its relativity is not that critical. It indulges clerical work, data processing and basic transcription, and software details.

Highly-skilled:

You might need people here, consisting of more advanced skills which you can attain via filtering out the specific training and experience. It includes software engineering, contract law, and brand design.

When Should A Company Leverage Staff Augmentation?

When they want to: 

Increase capacity:

When there is a certain spike in the needs of the resources for the project, that’s where you will love augmenting the staff in your organization. This includes project work, increased production, a rise in customer demand and the seasonal business, and much more in the row.

Bridge to Hire:

It also acts as a bridge to provide the capacity to either a small team or the large team.

Specialized Skills:

When you require the exclusive skills for a period of time, even in that case, it is the best solution for your organization's needs. For instance, facilities setups, design solutions, technology setup, etc.

Strategic:

You might want to change the core strategies of the business, and you can do this by building an organization or team by hiring flexible labor to gain a competitive advantage and to bring more agility to the business operations.

The Surprising Benefits Of The Staff Augmentation Services

Staff augmentation services knits the pathway between skilled people and the availability of short-term positions in software companies. This specific aspect provides flexibility to the software companies to extend the people with an ideal skill set for the specific project. Let us take a look at how much beyond it can go for exploring the benefits.

Access To The Large Pool Of Talents:

When someone follows the same permanent hiring process, it stretches back the capability of the firm to leverage the talent they are finding in the market. But when someone goes for the staff augmentation services, it acts as short-term hiring, which permits the businesses to access a large pool of skilled professionals. Welcoming a new thought process on board is the perfect instance of IT staff augmentation services.

Staff augmentation gets you the most benefit at your table while connecting you with the experienced professional, even that work for a shorter duration.

Cost-effectiveness:

Cost-saving is the major benefit of staff augmentation. I would give you an instance where if you want to hire talent, what do you need to watch on? You need to know the standard of living for the specific country, their social security insurance cover, the taxes they pay as well as other expenses. Once you filter out the ones having a minimal standard of living, you can find the best talent out there.

In cost-effectiveness terms, staff augmentation services will also help in reducing the training costs of the new ones.

Expansion and Adoption:

Expansion without any worries?

Sounds Great!

We all know how IT companies are eager to scale up their businesses for the profits they can earn. But what stops those industries? It is the risk of failure and the lack of capital in the business expansion. Staff augmentation services would greatly help the businesses as it permits them to extend dedicated teams without any investment in permanent-based hiring.

Difficulty in adapting to the fluctuating market conditions?

Besides expansion, staff augmentation also helps in achieving the same with outstanding responsiveness and support of the project-oriented development team.

Operational Efficiency:

When the startups accelerate in the market, they experience a substantial operational cost with less ROI. You can find flexible working platforms for your startups, and they can hire a dedicated team for their project requirement.

Alongside, it will lessen the cost of operations by easing the hiring of the software or any business domain expert. These can result in high business revenues.

Improvement in the stagnant business growth:

When you have a workplace that is fixed, you can only access the knowledge that is possessed by the persons working with you. If you lack current market knowledge and opinions, your business growth will become still. A new outlook will be pushed with the staff augmentation on hiring a diverse set of professionals.

Best control:

Having complete control on the project management is possible with firms leveraging the professionals in the process of staff augmentation. So, there is a stronghold over the projects, and they can shape them as per their project requirements. Company may have an issue in following the same, but the staff augmentation solutions prevent any such deviation.

Choosing The Right Staff Augmentation Model

There are organizations that want a conglomerate of the providers and depending on their project requirements. When your business is all set to consider IT staff augmentation, you need to consider what you’re trying to get a hold onto. For instance, if you’re looking for proficiency in Big Data, you can’t question its cost as it is a high-demand skill today. Prioritizing the cost here would be so unrealistic. It is sometimes critical to choose the best staff augmenting operating model but analyzing its pros and cons can bring many reality versions of experimenting it into your business.

Why Augment Your Team With Seasia?

Staff augmentation leverages the capabilities of the experts cost-effectively and efficiently. If your business needs a boost, try hiring a staff augmentation solution company and get access to the pool of proficient experts who has vast experience in their fields.

Seasia Staff Augmentation Services are available 24*7 as per your convenience and project requirements, whether there is a need for one expert or an entire team. Augment your team with the best people for your project. Try the cross-functional strategy for the changing needs of your firm.

Implement new minds to your business and keep experimenting when it’s about the rise in the business’s ROI.

Need help with choosing the right App Development Solutions?

Ganesh Verma

Ganesh Verma is an avid IT enthusiast with around 19 years of experience. Currently associated with Seasia Infotech, a CMMI level 5 organization he has demonstrated his techno managerial capabilities in orchestrating strategic goals and objectives of the organization and guidance to the project teams to deliver the same. He has been instrumental in building credibility, establishing rapport, and communication with stakeholders at multiple levels to maintain profitable business relationships with existing customers.

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