Thinking of IT Staff Augmentation in 2021? Read This Before Proceed

Do you want to start a project immediately and introduce work process efficiency? Staff augmentation could turn out to be an effective way to leverage existing resources and utilize outsourced resources for the benefit of your company. IT staff augmentation companies can assist businesses with contract programmers and a number of staffing solutions based on the needs and the budget of the businesses. 

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According to a recent stat, countries like the UK are already losing about £63 billion a year due to 600,000 unfilled vacancies in digital technology. Also, 89% of employers feel that the shortage of tech skills will also affect them badly in the months to come. Does it mean the end of the creative economy in the UK? Definitely, staff augmentation is one of the best ways to get out of it.

There are many benefits to staff augmentation in the IT sector. Till professional IT personnel to work on specific requirements, creating and maintaining the additional infrastructure and manpower, and save time & money. It is natural for companies to have concerns over the IT staff’s ability and productivity that they have hired following the recommendation of the staffing companies. 

But the well-structured recruitment process and comprehensive screening process by these companies will ensure that critical information is validated and candidates are chosen based on their performance and ability to handle the job requirement. 

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Have a look at some important reasons why IT staff augmentation will be on boom in 2021:

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IT staff augmentation is pocket friendly for all types of businesses

Staff augmentation through outsourcing helps IT businesses or software companies cut costs at all levels of their business process. As I mentioned earlier, you can pay the additional staff only for the amount of the hours that they have work for you. In addition, you need not spend on various employee benefits, hiring, taxes, etc. Besides, it helps reduce the cost of training on the latest technologies, since the additional staff is chosen because of their experience and expertise in particular tools & technologies and they just require little acclimatization.

Increase in flexibility and adaptability.

When you avail of IT staff augmentation services, it can be pretty beneficial for the scalability of your organization. Also, you can take on projects of different sizes and never say no to a prestigious customers’ request. With IT staff augmentation, you can expand your employee workforce as required. It can also help you diversify your software development services and deliver quality software solutions to your clients with the expertise you gain from staff augmentation.

You get better control over your team.

Staff augmentation also gives you complete control over your software development project at all times as well as regular monitoring as compared to outsourcing your project. When you fully outsource your software development project, you will not be able to track the project progress as well as the quality of your software development project is completely dependent on the outsourced team. When you choose staff augmentation services, you can schedule augmentation at any request in order to enhance the efficiency of your software development project. Also, it helps reduce security as well as privacy risks that may happen in outsourcing.

Resist the employee attrition rate.

In many instances, the requirement for staff augmentation services arises due to unexpected attrition of the employees. With the help of staff augmentation, companies can keep critical project management and delivery schedules from stagnating. There are some stats, up to 40% of employees of IT companies are looking for quick changes in their job as the economy grows. In addition, IT staff augmentation is a perfect solution for both parties, businesses can have an ample amount of staff on hand, and on the other hand, IT professionals can put their expertise to better use on a larger stage.=

Staff Augmentation vs Managed IT Services

Now many people ask about IT staff augmentation and how it is different from managed services. Let’s understand what the difference is and why it matters depending on what type of project you might be evaluating. 

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Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation generally as the name implies augmenting your team right you’re adding developers or designers or another tech talent into your existing team that is internal to your managed IT services. On the other hand, it is a completely outsourced model right in that you are basically saying our company doesn’t want to have anything to do with IT. 

We want to focus on what we do best and we want a partner who is going to manage every single aspect of IT. Therefore, this is not just you know development or a particular project. Staff augmentation services emerged from the need to address short-term budgetary pressures, resource constraints, and headcount limitations. In addition, IT and operations managers use various external resources in order to fill gaps in internal resources and they also avoid hiring people into fixed positions. After completing the project, external resources will no longer be in the budget of the manager. 

This working model begins to be seen as a long-term solution. After the completion of the project, the contract for the different external resources is not annulled. As the augmented resource gains knowledge of internal processes, systems, and people becomes valuable, if not indispensable. After the completion of the project, he or she is redeployed to the next available project and continues to work for that particular company as a contractor for many years. In addition, the continued growth in staff augmentation (in the tens of billions of dollars all across the globe) is due to a plethora of market factors, which include the large number of professionals preferring to work as independents, steadily declining rates, seemingly never-ending pressures of profit on most of the firms, and corporate policies that restrict hiring. 

Managed IT Service

In the managed IT services, clients look beyond conventional outsourcing standards or hiring short-term contract IT staff in order to get the long-term benefits that they expect from their solution partner. In addition, the key is to look beyond the initial savings proposition and ask your employees “what’s next”. The traditional managed IT services model allows companies of all sizes to outsource the management, operation as well as delivery of their processes so as to reduce their total ownership cost.

With managed IT services, companies will be freed from necessary but time-consuming tedious tasks. In addition, you will be free to focus on the right resources and people as well as on the right things. On the other hand, your strategic initiatives will fall into place while increasing productivity and efficiency. In addition, this also makes the model an attractive long-term strategy. The pricing structure of managed IT services is totally based on a regular monthly billing cycle that is based on service volumes and levels, rather than daily costs that are associated with staff augmentation services, which ensures that overall operational costs of the IT project remain within the forecast. Also, costs are less volatile in the managed IT services, which facilitates precise and predictable budgeting for the businesses.=

How IT staff augmentation is different from Nearshore outsourcing? 

Many people may have encountered the term staff augmentation but there’s a range of different subsets. So when we’re talking about staff augmentation, first and foremost we’re talking about bringing on other team members specifically related to IT staff. You’re bringing them into your own company to augment what your current internal IT team is working on. 

Now specifically when we’re talking about nearshore we’re talking about software developers that are within generally accepted practices about 3 timezones. The reason we are calling that nearshore as opposed to what people are more usually familiar with which is the concept of offshore or outsourcing is that you’re generally focusing on people that are within close proximity to you. As opposed to offshore which tends to be associated with the classic example, India or any other country. 

We’ll go into a couple of benefits of why nearshore is more advantageous than offshore but that at a very high level is what initial staff augmentation is all about.   

You are looking for staff augmentation because you don’t have the people in our own internal team. You don’t have a particular coding language or a particular skill set. So you’re trying to get software developers who have that skill set and have it at a very senior level or you know a particular level that is suitable for the tech projects you’re working on. By doing that you need to go elsewhere. 

Now, what can you do? Well you could try and find them in the United States and that’s certainly possible but it’s likely to be very expensive. Anyone who’s in one of the major metropolitan areas knows that developers command a very hefty salary. It’s a very difficult skill set to match? So you either pay up those rates and you’re competing obviously against a lot of other companies onshore who are trying to pay for those developer rates.  On the other hand, you go offshore now comparing offshore to nearshore both of them have the same cost-benefit and in relation to the onshore right because they are generally in countries that don’t have as high you know economies and they’re usually using tech as an export that the costs are going to be lower. There are two main benefits when we’re talking about nearshore specifically because generally near shore is going to be a fraction more expensive than traditional offshore but you get two main things: communication and culture. 

Communication obviously as we mentioned it’s within three time zones so that means if you’re having daily scrums with your tech team well your nearshore developers can join them. A classic example I use here is that if you’re on the East Coast and you have a 9 o’clock scrum meeting well if your developers are in Latin America chances are it’s only going to be about 10 o’clock in the morning for them. 

Well, that’s perfect. That’s within the working day so they’re able to join and there’s no miscommunication. This is the biggest problem when you engage a vendor that’s outside of your country in that if you were to say partnering with India. When you’re awake they’re asleep and when they’re awake you’re asleep so just having that slight half day out of sync can create some real problems with getting a smooth consistent flow of your tech team. So that’s one benefit. 

Let’s Wrap Up

I hope this blog gives you a clear idea about staff augmentation and how it is different from managed IT services and nearshore outsourcing services. No doubt, staff augmentation is the best solution for hiring experts as per your business needs and within a stipulated time frame; therefore many software development companies are providing staff augmentation services to the business to meet their resource requirement. If you also need to avail of staff augmentation services, you can contact these companies.