The Essential Guide to Staff Augmentation

Many business models are going through massive changes, trying to adapt to the new market requirements and needs that recently emerged due to the social and economic landscapes.

Quick changes might be difficult to implement, requiring new strategies, technologies and skills. And because many companies fear not getting left behind, they are starting to look into staff augmentation now more than ever. 

In fact, 75% of North American and European executives expect increased technology investments through 2024. This means increasing the skilled manpower to implement all these new technologies. Yes, the future is here!

In this article, we’ll give you all the essential information you need to know about staff augmentation. Here is the breakdown: 

What Is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation is a business practice in which companies fill in a staff-related gap in order to supplement different aspects of their business.

This outsourcing model runs on a complementary strategy, bringing in new talent with capabilities that enhance or complement the current in-house team. 

How It Works

Here are 4 simple steps on how staff augmentation works:

• Determining the need – the company identifies its need to bring more staff to its team.
• Sourcing talent – the company finds a staff augmentation provider.
• Onboarding the augmented team 
• Providing continuous support and feedback to the added team. 

Here is a quick example of staff augmentation: let’s say a business has an in-house agile team which develops its internal, custom-made, invoice-generating software, but they need fast upgrades to the software. Because their team lacks capacity, and the process of hiring new employees would take too much time, staff augmentation is the best way to go, offering a quick solution to a pressing matter.

When Do Companies Need Staff Augmentation?

Companies can choose to hire augmented staff for a variety of reasons.

When a company decides it’s time to look for an external skill set, it’s usually because they need to develop or extend new modules, components or functionalities to their current digital products.  

Staff augmentation solutions can be also used by companies who plan to dive into brand extensions but they first need to test the water with resources from different locations. In this case, hiring an external team can also be a solution.

Here are some of the most common reasons why companies are looking into staffing providers:

• the necessity of enhanced delivery
• the necessity to upgrade an internal process
• lack of in-house competence
• lack of internal engineering capacity
• difficulty in hiring and training experts
• difficulty in growing and managing a new team
• on-demand team availability, on and off, as needed
• slow development, they need speed of execution
• limited budget or tight budget

Staff augmentation services have evolved tremendously. Although they are probably most linked to software development industries, staff augmentation is widely available for many other business areas like marketing, sales, R&D, finance, sales, HR, or any other industry that looks to expand its digital solutions. 

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

From industry to industry, and even from company to company, hiring an outsourcing team might have different benefits. But when it comes to the top benefits of IT staff augmentation, we list below some of the most valued staff augmentation benefits our clients are looking for. 

Increasing Scalability

For software providers, scalability is vital. Companies need to quickly adapt to the constantly evolving market, the new trends and emerging technologies.

Adopting a staff augmentation model brings new talent fast within the company, which gives it the resources to scale its services and knowledge. 

Let’s say a company knows that it needs product diversity in order to stay on top of the trends, but it doesn’t have all the resources to expand its team. They want to add a mobile version to their digital product, and since their competition isn’t on the mobile market yet, they can easily take advantage of the market gap. Hiring an augmented team of iOS developers, Android or cross-platform developers can bring them on top of the market by quickly diversifying the base product with the help of a complementary, outsourced team. 

Boosting Recruitment Flexibility

When it comes to recruitment in the software development industry, we can all agree it can be quite a challenge.

The dynamic nature of the industry is pushing specialists to constantly move from one project to another. This makes the recruiting process more tricky. 

Knowing exactly what you need and for how long, makes the recruiters’ job easier since they know exactly what to look for when matching the right professional with the project requirements. 

Staff augmentation brings flexibility in recruiting. Recruiters have access to top talent, can interview candidates quickly and deliver fast results. The quick recruitment process can also contribute to the overall job satisfaction of engineers who want their abilities matched with projects of different backgrounds.

Location-wise, staff augmentation allows companies to pick cost-efficient teams with strong IT backgrounds. Countries like Romania offer top IT talent from great computing Universities. 

Cutting Costs Without Sacrificing Quality

With staff augmentation, companies can recruit specific skill sets that their in-house team lacks. By adding to their team’s skills and knowledge, companies benefit from a full-time, complex team, while lowering the original costs of hiring full-time.

For example, hiring teams from the UK or US could be very expensive, so a good strategy would be to go for near-shore or offshore staff augmentation, where they can find the same quality at lower prices.

In case you are worried about adding complete strangers from the other side of the world to your in-house team, experienced companies like Fabrit offer cohesive teams which help companies consolidate their core business values and reach their desired targets. 

How? In our case, our teams are united through trust and common values, accountability and commitment. This unity goes beyond Fabrit and extends to our clients, forming a one-team which pursues common objectives and ambitions. 

Providing Cherry-Picked Skills

One of the biggest advantages of staff augmentation is that companies can pick specifically which skills to complement their existing team. The extra talent fills in the gaps the project requires. 

Engineers specialize in different industries and programming languages. Companies can contract a cross-functional engineering team of various seniority levels through augmentation vendors. This could consist of Python, .NET, Angular and React engineers, project managers, UI/UX designers, QA, DevOps Engineers, and the list can go on and on.

So companies can cherry-pick very specific skill sets to hire, to fit their needs and cover certain skill gaps.

Offering a Fresh Pair of Eyes

Companies can easily get caught up in their day-to-day activities and lose touch with alternative solutions.

Hiring external colleagues can bring in new ideas and solutions. 

We would advise companies to look for software development vendors that have proven experience in their industry field or have built digital platforms similar to what their company is looking to build. This way, the new team’s various experiences with similar products can bring new perspectives and solutions.  

Staying Ahead of the Curve

After the pandemic, many companies struggle to fill in gaps for technology talent in order to not get left behind. 

Staying competitive in this new economic environment requires new strategies and practices. 

Bringing in new staff to help with the gaps can put your company or product ahead of the curve. 

The flexibility and cost efficiency lets companies access talent fast and build digital products quickly, which allows them to test the market with the new product with minimum resources.

This fast-paced way of working and testing the market can help companies stay ahead of the curve in their industry.

Types of Staff Augmentation 

Staff augmentation can be split into three main different categories, based on the labour skill needed:

• Commodity
• Skill-based
• Highly-skilled

Commodity staff augmentation services don’t require specialization. It has to do more with the urgency to fill in openings. Examples of commodity staff augmentation are factory workers, retail workers, or any other manual labour.

Skill-based staff augmentation – just like the name suggests, this type of staff augmentation service requires basic skills – think of typing, using a computer, or basic organizational skills. Examples of this category can be data entry, transcription, basic copywriting or clerical work.

Highly-skilled staff augmentation services require specific high-level skills linked to high education or vast experience. Here we can name management, software engineering, contract law, etc. 

The IT staff augmentation niche falls into the latter category described above.
It needs specific skill availability, covering complex activities, which in turn can help optimize the company’s turnover and costs, increasing the efficiency of the core business and accelerating its development.

Based on the length of the services, staff augmentation can be simply divided into:

• short-term
• long-term

The short-term service type is usually used for small projects, when the current in-house team is unavailable, while the long-term type is suitable for bigger, time-consuming projects when hiring an in-house team would be necessary but leveraging team augmentation services is wiser due to the above-described benefits. 

But before going any further, make sure you know the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing, in order to choose the best outstaffing strategy. 

Staff Augmentation Vs. Outsourcing

Staff augmentation and outsourcing are usually interchangeably used because both models present similarities. Below we’ll list the main differences between the two:

• Staff augmentation is about allocating tasks to external teams, working together on the same project, while outsourcing is contracting an external team to work separately on a particular project, with clear specifications and outcomes. 
• The client has more control over the augmented team than over the outsourced one. 
• Staff augmentation has more overall team cohesion while an outsourced team is not as blended in with the company’s internal team. 

So when sketching the main characteristics of your need, make sure to first identify whether you need a staff augmentation or an outsourcing service.

How to Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Team

You might think that outstaffing a dedicated team can be challenging, or overwhelming.

In fact, the process of picking the right staff augmentation provider is quite straightforward. You need to know exactly what you’re looking for.

Know Your Need

Knowing exactly what you need is vital in the process of expanding your team.

Here are some details you should take into consideration:

• how long will the project last?
• what skills does your current team lack?
• what is your budget?
• what are the roles you need to cover within the established budget?
• what are the industry-specific particularities that the new team needs to match?
• what is the hourly rate you are willing to pay? 
• what vendor characteristics are essential to you? Core values, culture or the way they engage with you?

Research Staff Augmentation Agencies

The most reliable way of researching staff augmentation agencies is to ask around. 

Yes, we know that recommendations are difficult to track down, and this is why there are plenty of platforms that offer an excellent starting point for your research. Probably one of the most reliable platforms out there right now is Clutch.

Make a list of the best agencies that seem to accommodate your needs based on the above-defined criteria and contact them.

Create a Shortlist

Based on the replies you get from the agencies you contacted, create a shortlist of your favorites.

Reviews at this point can be highly helpful since they can make a difference between service providers. 

Check for a match in culture, processes, desire to grow and if they can support the growth you are looking for.

Negotiate the Contract

Once the shortlist is done, you can start to negotiate with the handful of vendors on your list: get to know them better, how their internal team works, their company culture and any other aspects you might want to know. 

Once you’ve picked a winner and signed off the contract, the external team will soon join the local team and will start working together towards the same goal.

Staff Augmentation Examples

As we have mentioned before, the need for staff augmentation could be diverse. but we have listed two successful examples of staff augmentation in the software development industry. 

Start-up Business

Digital platform type: Sport facilities booking platform

Staff Augmentation Need: the client was looking to partner with a reliable, versatile technical team that could complement their business, design and strategy team every step of the way. The partner had to quickly adapt to a fast-paced startup, from MVP development, to market validation, adoption and future scale-up.  

Our solution: We initially provided a team of Web developers, to build an MVP with the aim of validating the product, and attracting the first clients and future investors. The client experienced a huge success which required a fast expansion of the development team. Subsequently, we have augmented the client’s team with further Backend and Mobile developers, QAs, DevOps, UI/UX and a Project Manager. By providing further internal team members, fast hiring techniques and through partners from our local network, the client has scaled the product to the rest of North America and Canada. This collaboration is ongoing, having 25 tech professionals helping our client continue to strategically scale their business and provide a leading booking platform for their clients. 

Scale-up business

Digital platform type: Influencer marketing platform

Staff Augmentation Need: the client needed extra staff to provide the acceleration of their digital product development (the biggest matchmaking platform for brands and influencers in America).

Our solution: Initially, we have augmented the client team with 4 Seniors Engineers, each of them for a key part of their system (one Java Engineer, one NodeJs Engineer, one UX/UI Designer, and one DevOps Engineer) to start the knowledge transfer from the client team towards us. Once the tech leads internalized the necessary knowledge about the product, we extended the teams with further developers and PMs. Furthermore, we added a Machine Learning team. The project is ongoing, with scalable plans for up to 20 team members to build more functionality to the current platform, and also to create an additional tool that will complement the current platform.

Our cooperation model is focused on supplying Highly Skilled agile teams: when you need professionals with very advanced skills that can be achieved only through effective training and experience.

Conclusion

Staff augmentation offers easy access to a large talent pool, based on very specific needs.

You can even build an entire project with augmented, cross-functional teams – if that’s what works for you.

Staff augmentation is constantly evolving and it is very effective for companies that want to add extra talent to their team on an on-demand basis. It offers businesses a lot of flexibility, cost-efficiency and power to scale while having a tight grip on the overall project.

At Fabrit, we have learned that the closer we collaborate with the client, the better the results.