14/03/2023
🤫 If you consider IT outsourcing, wonder how it works and how it can work best precisely for your company, this is for you. Today we start a 3-post series about the engagement models so stay tuned to find out more.
We’ll back our stories with actual examples from the past projects, so you can get a first-person perspective on how we collaborate with our partners.
The model we’re looking at today is called staff augmentation. One or several ExtTech experts fill up or complement your in-house teams based on specialization and project requirements. For example, you might add one back-end engineer, one front-end engineer and an AQA engineer without spending much time searching and hiring these professionals.
Fast onboarding is your biggest advantage with this model. It only takes a week for an expert to join, and you can close several positions simultaneously.
Choosing to outsource on the whole, you don’t only save time. We, as an outsourcing services provider, focus on covering a broad pool of technologies, even the niche ones like Big Data. This means you can find experts for any queries that you might have.
Another upside of staff augmentation is that hiring individual contractors over regular employees helps you avoid complex bureaucracy and excessive paperwork. Your obligations towards outsourced staff end where a contract ends — terminating cooperation or putting it on hold is just as easy as starting it. In this regard, our next competitive edge gets the spotlight. Whereas most vendors’ minimum contract term is a year, we don’t have this limitation. Even if you need to close an urgent project that takes only a couple of months, we are still here to get your back.
At the same time, contract-limited cooperation is also a downside because if you like the experts, you’d be willing to continue working with them. Thus, staff augmentation’s nature becomes an obstacle because our experts are only brought in at a certain project stage to complement your in-house workforce. They aren’t present from ideation of a feature or a project, so they may lack some contextual knowledge that may prove necessary.
Besides, in the long run, the most viable effects of staff augmentation — fast onboarding and related budget savings — diminish. This is because by that time the experts brought in under other models will have deeper integration, accumulate more contextual knowledge and benefit your business more.
Staff augmentation is best for temporary assistance, i.e. addressing increased workload or when you need to utilize the budget fast. If you need more, you should consider one of the other two models. We’ll cover them later in our following publications.
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