Staff augmentation has emerged as a new age outsourcing strategy where human resources are hired in view of the specific skills a project needs, existing talent pool available and outsourced short term hiring for the skills not available in-house. While conventional outsourcing is practiced when an organization gives the control of the development to a third party altogether, a staff augmentation company lets you add specific talent to the in-house team, only for the desired period of time. As such, the element of control over the development process is much higher in case of augmentation.
Businesses come across situations where a large project is to be carried out with strict deadlines and the resources available are just not enough. The options available are either to hire talent, or to outsource the requirement or to augment staff to the existing teams. Each of these options has their fair share of pros and cons vis-à-vis the requirement. A business has to carefully gauge the scope of requirement, the need of special skills and the future scalability potential before choosing one of the above.
Staff augmentation is an alternative to permanent hiring, giving businesses the leverage human resource in short term assignments requiring specific skill individuals or sub-process teams, working in close proximity with the In-house body.
How to go about augmenting team for your business:
- The organization planning to augment human resources to the existing team needs to estimate the exact number of resources needed, the desired skills set, their qualifications benchmark, functional expertise and experience.
- Once the requirements are finalized and documented, the next step is to screen the candidates shortlisted by the staff augmentation company to make sure they are qualified enough for the job. The next step is to successfully amalgamate the new team members into the existing team and make them comfortable in the new team and organization. There needs to be continuous support and nurturing of the new extended team, to develop a comfortable professional environment.
- The agreement with the staff augmentation firm should ideally include a Non disclosure agreement to safeguard the intellectual property as the newly extended team becomes full-time workforce with access to important and confidential information of the organization.
Determining whether to augment your team or to outsource a new IT project depends on the current team’s capacity, qualification as well as your goals for the project. For a mobile app development company where the team already operates to the optimum potential and needs a project done quickly with minimal internal management, outsourcing the entire project may be the best bet. However, for companies who have a strong internal IT team and who have reliable, robust dependable management, staff augmentation might work wonders within budget.
