5 Benefits of Staff Augmentation
It is a balancing act keeping your full-time employees busy, but not so busy that they are overworked and burned out.
Augmentation is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as:
“The action or process of making or becoming greater in size or amount.”
Using a software and project staff augmentation model allows you to become greater in size, but also keep your key staff in place to run the organization and do what they do best. Using augmentation you don’t need to deal with the hassles of benefits, office space, and geography. You can find a team that is in your city or is not. It’s up to you to decide.
What Is Software and Project Staff Augmentation?
It’s the process of amplifying your existing team by providing laser-focused developers to help you get over the hump, back on track, or move more quickly. It allows you to keep control over the core functions of your organization and bring in seasoned experts who have built software for decades. You maintain the quality and branding of who you are and the augmentation team carries out the work.
Why Is It Needed?
In one word: Flexibility. With an uncertain landscape of future software development needs, augmenting your team using this approach gives you the ability to scale up and scale down as product development cycles. For example, you might need a minimum viable product (MVP) to test the market. Staff augmentation is perfect in this scenario. Use an augmented team to create the MVP to quickly bring it to the market where you can test and iterate on the idea, without having to have hired a team of full-time employees.
What Are the Benefits?
- Reduced costs – According to the small business association, the actual costs of hiring an employee are on average 1.4 times their salary. This is due to the employer share of FICA, federal and state unemployment tax, paid time off, retirement, workers’ compensation, insurance, and other costs.
- Improved employee morale and retention – If your full-time employees are overworked, they will feel neglected and not capable of doing their best work. Bringing in outside talent your employees are working with extremely qualified professionals that can share their experience and train your team on best practices and growth in their career.
- Expert skillset and scalable workforce – With staff augmentation you can scale up your need for specialists in certain skillsets and scale back the need for these skillsets when your team either learns them or the push to bring the product to market is complete.
- Support – Many full-time employees are more interested in working on research and development of new products rather than support. Using augmented staff to help with the support and maintenance of your product can make a lot of sense both from a cost and core business focus viewpoint.
- Save time – No need for you to handle recruiting, hiring, and then dealing with the overhead of having to train a full-time employee. Our talent hits the ground running.
Other Ways of Using Engineering and Project Staff Aug
Engineering and project staff augmentation can be used to train your employees on best practices, help get them set up and in place and then drop back to more of a support role and used as needed. As the leader within your organization, you can have both knowledgeable professionals who can guide your software engineering design, development, and the key staff needed to train your employees. It really is the best of both worlds.
Why It’s Here to Stay
Staff augmentation is a trend that is only getting more adoption as the years move on. With virtual work now common, the “gig-economy” of talented individuals wanting to be able to enter an organization, help them for a period of time and move on, and companies facing a labor shortage of high skilled software talent.
Conclusion
Businesses are recognizing the benefit of bringing in outside perspectives to help them bring their products to market quickly. With all of these factors together, staff augmentation might be the only way a company will be successful in having its product developed. Chances are your competition is already using it. Auditing firm KPMG surveyed over 3,000 technology leaders for their annual CIO Survey and found that an astonishing 65% said that hiring challenges are hurting the industry and are turning to augmentation and project outsourcing as one piece of their solution.
We can also be your team by providing turnkey skillsets to help complete your projects on time and on budget. Contact us today!
Why project outsourcing and how does it differ from staff aug?