Staff augmentation model means to promptly grow an internal IT department with talented professionals and increase business capability of addressing your tech tasks efficiently. If time is of the essence, such as when you need a mid-to-senior level developer or a niche specialist like a Scala developer or Big Data engineer, hiring in-house can be too slow. In that case, staff augmentation can be a quick fix to add the skills you need to satisfy the urgency of a project.
It’s a cutthroat world when it comes to talent, and the speed at which you can grow your tech team without compromising on quality is everything. Welcome to the world of IT augmented staffing.
What IT Staff Augmentation Is?
Staff augmentation is a kind of an outsourcing IT cooperation model when a certain company expands its on-site staff to extend its engineering resources to achieve success with technical tasks by temporarily hiring one or several professionals in IT outsourcing. These dedicated specialists are fully embedded in your teams and work with them to fulfil individual project requirements on an interim basis.
Fill your knowledge gap instantly with smart and agile remote professionals from Kultprosvet’s IT staff augmentation company – a flexible service of temporary solutions that lets you get the right people quickly and efficiently. You’re not handing over the entire project, as you would in full outsourcing. Instead, you’re plugging in some specialized guns into your existing team – A.K.A. hiring supercharged contract teammates.
For a skill gap, a rise in development workload, or just an impossible project deadline, IT Staff Augmentation can help. It’s a way for companies to remain lean while tapping into an enormous talent pool of global developers, engineers and designers.
Why Tech Leaders Are Looking to It
This model isn’t just for startups, either. More and more large and emergent middle market businesses are turning to staff augmentation to ensure they remain ahead in hyper competitive markets.
1. Speed and Flexibility
Traditional hiring is slow. The screening, interviews, onboarding — it all takes weeks or months. Staff augmentation can bring this timeline down significantly. You don’t have to spend weeks to have a vetted developer on your team.
Tech needs are fluid. You may need five backend developers now, but only one in three months. Staff augmentation lets you increase or decrease the workforce as conditions warrant—no obligations.
2. Access to Global Talent
‘Why would you restrict yourself to your zip code when the world is full of great developers?’ Through staff augmentation, businesses can access talent anywhere in the world, drawing on skills from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and beyond.
Looking for a Python developer with AI experience, or a React Native pro with fintech expertise? For vendors looking to boost staff, they may have candidate pools of niche professionals waiting to step in with those technical abilities in hand.
3. Cost-Efficiency That Makes Sense
No benefits packages to concern myself over. No office space to expand. With staff augmentation, you get what you need done how you want it and pay only for that expertise. It’s cheap, especially for project-based work.
It’s costly to hire the wrong candidate. When you scale, vendors will sometimes offer warranties and fast swaps — no need for a tedious HR process.
How It Works in Practice
Yet, curious what staff augmentation actually looks like day-to-day? Here are some of the ways tech companies are making it work.
- Identify the Gaps
Your product roadmap is solid. But do you have the manpower to do it? Maybe you need more front-end developers or a cloud architect. The exercise of augmentation begins with a realization of what we lack.
- Choose the Right Partner
Dozens of staff augmentation services are out there. The top ones rigorously vet their developers, have flexible engagement models and transparent pricing.
- Integrate Quickly
Once you have your developers up to speed, all that’s left is integration. Think of them as team members not as strangers. Loop them into your daily standups, provide context and make communication flow.
When Is It Appropriate to Use Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation isn’t a solution for everything — but it can be a game changer in the right cases.
Ideal for:
- Tight project deadlines
- Some tech expertise required, on a temporary basis
- Fast-scaling start-ups that can’t afford to hire slowly
- Product intros; MVPs
- Companies with internal resources that need some heavy lifting
Not a good fit for:
- Projects that need deep institutional understanding
- Permanent positions where culture fit is key
- If you don’t have in-house project manager
Real-World Wins
Fintech Firm Accelerates Product Launch
A fintech startup in the UK wanted to have a mobile app in three months. Their in-house team was strong — but small. They did it all by using staff augmentation to onboard three React Native developers, meeting their deadline and achieving a time to market reduction of 30%.
Faster Cloud Adoption for Enterprise
A large corporation that ranked on the Fortune 500 list had to move legacy onto AWS. Instead of employing cloud engineers, they bolstered their internal team with AWS-certified professionals for the duration of the 6-month migration window. The result? No downtime and $200,000 in overhead spared.
Looking forward: Why this model will only expand
The lack of global IT talent is here to stay. In fact, it’s accelerating. However, the move to remote work has shown that distributed teams can be successful. Collectively, these trends are solidifying IT staff augmentation as a foundation of contemporary hiring strategies.
Tech leaders have since learned: agility isn’t nice to have it’s survive or die. And that’s just what staff augmentation provides.
Final Thoughts
Staff augmentation is perfect for when you want to opt for handling your own project and manage your team yourself. But if you prefer to take a more hands-off approach, where an external vendor is fully responsible for project delivery, IT outsourcing can be a better choice. If you’re not sure what the difference is between staff augmentation and full IT outsourcing, you can read a brief comparison here that can help you determine which method is best for you, based on your requirements and resources.
IT staff augmentation is so much more than a stopgap solution. It’s an intelligent, scalable approach to creating powerful, adaptable teams in a constantly shifting world.
So the CTO next time your CTO says, “We need five developers. Yesterday.” – you’ll know what to do. Hint: Staff augmentation could be your ace in the hole.
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