What Is Staff Augmentation? How Can It Benefit Your Team

The expansion of the IT workforce is becoming increasingly common. According to Statista, the global revenue in the software market is predicted to increase between 2024 and 2028 by a total of 159.2 billion U.S. dollars (+22.78%). Of course, these numbers are impossible without a team that works constantly for the company’s development.

Today, it is important to stay ahead of the competition which means businesses must strive for growth while maintaining flexibility and resourcefulness continuously. That is where staff augmentation can help businesses to strengthen their working model and increase productivity and efficiency. Under this cooperative approach, an organization can temporarily hire one or more outsourced IT professionals to augment its in-house workforce.

In this blog, we will learn about staff augmentation and how it is benefitting the IT industry to boost team productivity.

What Is Staff Augmentation?

To put simply, staff augmentation is the temporary use of outside workers to increase an organization’s capacity. Businesses can hire staff based on skills, commodity project-based, time-based, etc. These are the different classifications of staff augmentation. It means there are ample ways a company staffs their projects through outsourcing to effectively fulfill submission deadlines or even enhance quality. This approach entails assessing the present workforce and identifying more expertise.

Additionally, businesses may save money on payroll services, hiring, and project execution. Since this recruiting strategy is easily scalable, ending this kind of partnership—even if an employment contract is terminated—is rather simple.

It is essential to mention here that there is a catch. Many people think that it is outsourcing. So, if you wonder about the difference between staff augmentation vs outsourcing: in staff augmentation, the company brings in temporary staff to work on specific tasks, while in IT project outsourcing, the company sends tasks outside to be fulfilled by third parties.

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How Does Staff Augmentation in IT Extend Your Team’s Productivity?

Now that we have understood what is staff augmentation, we will see how it has an impact on businesses worldwide. Especially, in the IT sector, staff augmentation plays a crucial role in enhancing team productivity and meeting project demands efficiently. Let’s see how:

Filling skill gaps

Among the many benefits that staff augmentation brings, one of which is team-filling skill gaps. This cycle involves the acquisition of professional competence from outside specialists and the in-house training of the team members, which together make a pronounceable contribution to the efficiency and success of work on the project.

Accessing specialized talent

IT staff augmentation enables companies to access specialized skills and expertise that may not be available in-house. Say, a business wants to develop an eCommerce application but on the other hand, has very few specialists to work on mobile app development. To fill the existing skill gap and guarantee that a customer requirement for a mobile app will be fulfilled, the business seeks IT staff augmentation companies to hire experienced professionals for project development.

These external experts are second to none as they have mastery over mobile technologies, UI/UX design principles, and platform-specific development tools, which will help a mobile app project to proceed in an error-free manner and meet the client’s deadline.

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Upskilling existing team members

Staff augmentation provides a chance for the team members to upskill themselves with the knowledge of experts outside the company. For instance, if the IT team has strong technical knowledge in backend development but weakness in frontend development, then the company will be experiencing a skills gap in frontend development.

An experienced front-end development specialist will be hired to be part of the team. The other members will be able to watch and learn skills like new technologies, coding ideas, and design principles as they are being implemented.

Teamwork in this environment results in a culture that supports the long-term process of professional advancement, thus improving the IT team’s skill sets and competencies.

Optimizing workflows

Businesses can easily optimize processes by cutting out non-essential steps and removing barriers that create bottlenecks resulting in increased efficiency and proper resource usage.

Streamlining processes

Usually, people hired through staff augmentation can cast a new light on the current problems within the organization and suggest rational as well as acceptable solutions which they have seen as improved best practices in other similar organizations.

Likewise, think of a situation in which a business has experienced some difficulties dealing with project management and collaboration because of ineffective workflows and communication gaps.

Hiring an agile project management expert via staff augmentation services allows the organization to have an expert with them whose native expertise lies in Agile methodologies, task prioritization, and team coordination.

The external consultant slightly imposes the standard operations aimed at achieving goals, such as the daily scrums, Kanban boards, and the regular progress report meetings. The execution of these methods allows the team to work as one solid force, prioritize tasks properly, and ensure the project’s completion promptly, which results in the best efficiency and project results.

Reducing bottlenecks

Additionally, staff augmentation plays a crucial role in identifying and addressing bottlenecks in IT workflows. For example, consider a situation where the IT infrastructure team has been battling network performance issues, which are preventing them from promptly performing system updates and maintenance.

Hiring an experienced specialist through augmentation can help the company figure out all network bottlenecks, boost performance tuning methods, and also make proactive network health monitoring.

This directed intervention minimizes the downtime operation, increases the system reliability gradually, and optimizes the resource utilization accordingly which consequently increases the overall productivity and operational efficiency.

Increased capacity and efficiency

IT staff augmentation is also a way to address the persistent problem of adding capacity and efficiency within the organization. It enables IT departments to handle big projects perfectly during a specific period or can withstand sudden peaks in a workload by maintaining quality.

Scaling up for projects

Staff augmentation is an already existing resource for the IT teams which gives them flexibility to scale the team’s capacity quickly when they deal with large projects or sudden workload surges. This way, there is no deadline missed or the quality of deliverables compromised.

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Meeting deadlines more effectively

The added capacity and expertise from staff augmentation contribute significantly to meeting project deadlines more effectively. For example, a business that wants to launch a mobile app for their services must ensure to meet the deadline aligned with the dynamic market needs.

By incorporating the unique talents of mobile app developers and UX/UI designers into its development team, the organization achieves progress at better speed and completes each task on time and with high quality.

Cost-effectiveness and flexibility

One of the biggest benefits of staff augmentation is that it can help businesses lower costs and offer flexibility across various operations. This way of operation helps enterprises to spend their finances most efficiently by not having to incur ongoing employment costs and a request for expertise only when there is a need.

Avoiding full-time hiring costs

Traditional hiring often comes with long-term commitments, overhead costs, and expenses associated with salaries, benefits, training, and retention. With that, the companies under the staff augmentation model can be free from the need to pay for any full-time hiring expenses by outsourcing the project-oriented workers or skilled personnel for specific periods. This cost management tactic implies that companies would pay only for the knowledge and tools they need at the time, without getting subsequently restricted by lengthened financial obligations.

Paying for expertise when needed

Staff augmentation offers a chance to address the demand for resources according to the project requirements. The combination of readily available experts from all over the world enables companies to hire for expertise when it is needed and to release staff quickly as required.

Such agility in resource allocation brings about cost-effectiveness as companies can invest in a broad range of professionals while at the same time reducing the time spent on assigning roles.

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Ready for Staff Augmentation? Act Now

Staff augmentation turns out to be a tactical and fruitful method for those companies willing to improve the flexibility of their workforce and to meet the project deadlines successfully. With the assistance of staff augmentation, you will not have to deal with the long-term financial obligations that are usually associated with traditional hiring methods and can allocate your resources with better efficiency.

If you need to swiftly increase your team or fill a talent gap, staff augmentation is an excellent solution. Numerous benefits are associated with it, including cost savings, openness, and flexibility. Make sure you carry out in-depth market research to identify the most appropriate organization before selecting the outsourcing partner.