Top 3 Benefits of Staff Augmentation
Today, through outsourcing service, many large and enterprise software projects can be completed in a short period of time meeting launching deadlines without any compromising in quality while still meeting budget requirements.To achieve this, a lot of business organizations have successfully adopted staff augmentation which is a model of IT outsourcing service. With staff augmentation, business organizations can add developers from software outsourcing companies to complement their in-house IT team for varying lengths of time depends on the project's requirement.
This helps to deliver the project faster and more efficiently.
Real-life examples of staff augmentation
For many custom software development projects, a diverse team of IT professionals with a broad range of skills are usually required. However, the man-hours required for each specialist varied differently according to specific project needs.
For instance, a 6 months mobile app development project might need an architect for 2 weeks man-hour. Here, it doesn’t make sense to hire an architect on a permanent basis to only work for 2 weeks. Staff augmentation can absolutely help to scale up the customer in-house teams on-demand to speed-up the delivery and time-to-market.
Staff augmentation does not limit to just one member but can provide multiple staff (e.g. engineers, testers/QA, architects etc.) to the existing team. Furthermore, staff augmentation can last as long as needed and also be tailored made to meet specific business requirements by customer company.
Staff augmentation vs. full-time hiring
Hiring full-time staff is a great option but it might take weeks or even months for organizations to hire the right candidates. And this did not include training and onboarding time. With staff augmentation, the customer company can be sure that all the developers who will participate in their projects have already undergone a thorough hiring and training process.
Furthermore, by participating in various software development projects in the past, the developers provided by outsourcing vendors would have the required expertise to work on the projects on day one without wasting time or causing delays in project days.
It’s also worth noting that due to a shortage of skilled IT professionals, it has become even more costly to hire qualified developers. If it is a one-off project then it makes sense to employ the services of staff augmentation to temporarily bring IT talents to work on and help complete the project. However, if companies need the developers for long-term purposes then full-time hiring makes more sense here.
Top 3 benefits of staff augmentation
Here are the top 3 main benefits provided by staff augmentation:
- Speed-up the process
Many software development medium scale projects with only a few minimum requirements in the beginning can evolve into a large one with a heavy schedule, requiring significant extra resources and efforts.
Hiring experienced full-time developers to help keep up with the projects can take a very long time while the project is approaching deadlines. Through staff augmentations, companies can have on-demand access to experienced developers who possess the various necessary skills and expertise required of the project. This would help keeping the project moving despite the increase in the project scope and complexity.
- Access to large pool of IT talents and reduce of staff turnover rate
As mentioned above, due to the shortage of skilled IT professionals, many companies find it difficult to hire and retain full-time IT developers. A high rate of staff-turnover would prove to be a disadvantage for any business organization, losing team members in the middle of a project is the worst thing that any company can think of.
To solve this challenge, many organizations look into staff augmentation to help fill in the void while they search for a replacement. This helps the projects to continue to run smoothly and avoid missing deadlines coming.
- Knowledge Transfer
In addition to working on the development process which would involve coding, designing, and software testing, and others, staff augmentation can also augment customers’ team in a consulting capacity to help provide training and best practices in software development as well as project management.
Once the project ends, the customers are better equipped to manage the project and grow the software product on their own.
For example, agile methodology provides a great deal of benefits for software development, and augmented staff when managing clients’ projects, they will bring their expertise in Agile to such project. The final result is a more efficient process of project management improving team capacity and productivity.
Bonus point: Access to latest technologies
Technology is growing rapidly and more advanced in this day and age, it can be difficult for companies to keep up with all the latest technologies in software development that are needed for their development project.
Outsourcing companies that provide staff augmentations have a team of developers, designers, and architects possessing a wide range of skill set can provide you with the assistance on-demand without requiring companies to go through the extra length of the hiring process.
More importantly, many companies only require extra specialists only for a certain period of time, and hiring full-time would prove to be costly. Staff augmentation offers the benefits of flexibility and cost reduction since companies only have to pay for the developers during the course of the project.
Endnote
TP&P technology is a top-ranked software company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. With many years of experience and numerous completed projects behind us, TP&P can help you overcome any technical challenges that you might already be encountering. When you work with any TP&P team of developers, you have the skills and expertise as well as the passion of our entire team behind them.
