What is IT Staff Augmentation? Is It the Right Choice to Scale Your Workforce?

IT Staff augmentation is the best alternative to traditional hiring paradigms to close the skill gap rapidly. Hire the experts you need on-demand to work under a contract, temporarily, or on an as-needed basis. 

Working with on-demand augmented staff benefits the organization in scaling its workforce while relieving the financial and administrative overhead of in-house employees. 

Beyond these captivating benefits, staff augmentation has many intricacies to understand before considering it to scale your workforce. Understanding these intricacies will help you to evaluate whether it is a right fit for your organization, or if you should think of alternative solutions. 

So, let’s get started to understand its intricacies. 

What is IT Staff Augmentation?

Put simply, IT staff augmentation refers to the practice of hiring external talent to address specific skill gaps and project requirements. This external talent is hired through a third-party staffing agency. 

It is a temporary arrangement that can be availed for both short-term and long-term duration varying from one organization to another. 

These augmented staff usually work on a project basis, for a specific duration, or as long as their expertise is required. 

How Does IT Staff Augmentation Work?

The process of staff augmentation starts by finding a third-party staffing agency that has the professionals who are the right fit for the job. 

The selection of an IT staff augmentation company is a crucial step and requires careful consideration to ensure you have access to highly trained professionals. Beyond expertise, experience, and the number of resources available, you should evaluate the existing client’s testimonials to assess how well a staffing agency stands on the promises it has made. 

Here is a breakdown of how IT staff augmentation works:

1. Requirement Understanding

The very first step is to understand the skills and the number of resources you need to augment. The best way to do so is by performing a skill gap analysis. List all the roles within your organization, and the skills needed for each role. This will help you to have data on technical skills, soft skills, and domain-specific knowledge. 

Compare the existing skill set with the skill you might need to complete a project during a specific set of time periods. Staff augmentation companies can also help you to perform a skill gap analysis. 

Armed with a clear understanding of your requirements, connect with a staffing services provider. 

2. Planning 

This is the time when your job of finding the right candidate begins. Based on the initial assessment, the staff augmentation services provider will match you with the candidates with the skills you require. 

You should evaluate each candidate’s profile carefully to verify the skills and experience are relevant to your requirements. Beyond technical skills, invest time in evaluating the soft skills to ensure they can align properly with your in-house team and deliver the impact that matters to you. 

3. Onboarding

The next step is to onboard the professionals, so they can start working with you. The augmentation providers often help with the onboarding process, reducing the hassle of paperwork, and making it easy to onboard. 

You should have a structured onboarding process that helps the augmented staff to get familiar with the project goals, timelines, and specific requirements. Establish a secure communication channel between your internal and augmented team, so they can collaborate, and work together as a team. 

4. Manage and Monitor Augmented Staff’s Performance

Proactive performance monitoring is a must to ensure that augmented staff is working productively and delivering the results expected. Define the relevant key metrics, and measurable objectives for each staff to track their productivity. Additionally, you can use project management tools to track project progress to stay informed about the deadlines. 

Types of IT Staff Augmentation Models

The careful consideration of IT staff augmentation models is a must to determine their suitability for the current needs of your organization. To help you make an informed decision, here we have compiled a list of the most popular models:

1. Offshore Staff Augmentation

Offshore staff augmentation refers to the practice of hiring external talent from overseas locations. This talent will work remotely as an extended arm of the organization allowing the organization to benefit from specialized skills with no long-term commitment and geographical restrictions.  

For example, a US-based Salesforce consulting firm needs Agentrforce expertise but experiences a short supply of the local talent pool. They partner with a Salesforce expert from India who has expertise working on Agentforce. The professional will work remotely from India with the US-based team as long as the expertise is required.

2. Project-Based Staff Augmentation

As the name implies, project-based staff augmentation refers to the practice of hiring external talent to work on a specific project for a fixed duration. The hired professionals will work remotely for the duration of the project driven by clear objectives, and timelines. 

3. Time & Material Based Staff Augmentation

It is a flexible IT staff augmentation model allowing only for the hours worked on your project, and materials used. 

The time & material-based model is the best choice for projects with uncertain or evolving requirements. Unlike other staffing models, there is no upfront estimation of project duration or resource assertion required. The final cost will be the results of the total hours worked and resources used to complete the project.

 4. Dedicated Team Staff Augmentation

This model offers access to a team of IT professionals to work dedicatedly on a specific project. This team will supplement the in-house team by sharing a commitment to the organization’s time zone, values, and objectives. 

You will have complete control over the dedicated team from choosing preferred communication channels, project management, decision-making, and more. 

When Should You Consider IT Staff Augmentation?

IT staff augmentation is indeed a great practice for hiring talent to fill the skill gap without the overhead of traditional hiring. But, is it the right choice for you? Let’s find out:

1. When You Need Ready-to-Deploy Talent

IT Staff augmentation is the best choice when you want to relieve yourself from tedious hiring practices that are not only time-consuming but also require a hefty investment. 

According to Workable’s Benchmark tool, on average, it took 30 days to hire an employee in the IT/technology industry globally. This is just an estimated time that can be lengthened to 42-56 days when hiring an employee with specialized skills that are high in demand like a Salesforce developer. 

Additionally, investing that amount of time in hiring an employee to meet short-term needs not only results in excessive hiring costs but also lost opportunities.

IT staff augmentation allows you to hire professionals with the specialized skill set you need in the shortest amount of time. For example, Smart IT Staff can help you to hire a Salesforce developer within 0-2 days. 

This easy accessibility to ready-to-deploy talent ensures that your organization has skilled professionals at the time when you need them. 

2. When You Have a Project With Unpredictable Scope

When project requirements are fluid and unpredictable, IT staffing augmentation is the most preferred solution. 

It benefits you with the flexibility of scaling the resources up and down in response to shifting project requirements. Considering the lengthy hiring process, and legalities involved in terminating the employees when their expertise is no longer needed, this level of flexibility is a rare privilege with permanent staffing.

3. When You Want Full Control Over Project Execution

The most sought benefit of the in-house team is the complete control over the project. Staff augmentation retains this benefit, allowing complete control over the project direction, methodologies, and outcomes. 

Since you have full control over the project execution, you have ownership of all the work. Additionally, you can ask for augmented staff to work from your office premises facilitating greater control, and collaboration with the internal team. 

Final Take

Augmenting staff is one of the most effective ways to source the talent to supplement the in-house team to meet your short-term needs. You can take advantage of staff augmentation by connecting with staffing agencies like Smart IT Staff. 

We have a team of more than 400+ professionals having expertise working across platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Nintex, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Whether you want one member or an entire team, we have a pool of experts to meet your needs. Beyond staffing services, we also offer consulting services to help you with skill gap analysis, and platform-specific advice to ensure the optimal utilization of it.