Benefits and Challenges of IT Staff Augmentation
IT is a necessary enabler for the success of most businesses and industries today. To keep up with the increasing IT requirements and changing demands of the end-users, companies need a reliable, structured and systematic IT staffing solution that helps them match talent to requirements when needed and as required. What is a possible explanation for this? IT staff augmentation.
IT Staff Augmentation is extending an in-house IT team with external dedicated professionals or building and hiring a dedicated team from scratch for a specific project. Instead of hiring in-house developers that cost a fortune regarding salaries, overhead costs and other policies, hiring an IT staff team that works on your project externally for fixed project costs is more economical. It requires lesser managerial overlook from your end. However, the practice of IT Staff Augmentation has its challenges.
Benefits of IT Staffing Augmentation
To make a true assessment and proper evaluation of whether IT Staff Augmentation is the right choice for you, we will discuss the several benefits and challenges of IT staff augmentation that you should keep in mind.
Let’s start with the benefits –
Access to Specialized Expertise
One of the biggest benefits of IT Staffing Augmentation is gaining proper access to specialized talents. You may have a great in-house team but might need help with one particular requirement for whom there needs to be more local market availability. Through proper IT staff augmentation services, you can hire professionals with similar skill sets of expertise you’re looking for. Augmentation allows you to tap into a vast pool of specialized talents that cover a wide range of IT domains like web, software, development, design, security and much more.
Faster Time to Market
We live in a competitive business environment, and time to market at times is the crucial deciding factor between success and failure. Hence by leveraging reliable IT staff augmentation services, you can assemble a professional team without having to undergo the entire hassle of head-hunting each talent, putting them through the basic evaluation test and further procedures. This reduction in hiring time saves big resources and allows you to gain a competitive edge.
Reduced Training Overhead
One of the biggest and unavoidable expenses of hiring in-house developers is the time and resources spent on training them regarding the fundamentals of your business and the IT processes they are responsible for. Employees hired from professional custom IT staffing agencies have these fundamentals clear and don’t need to be trained. Moreover, they generally have enough experience to offer valuable insights and knowledge to the existing team, which helps improve the overall skillset of the entire team.
Cost-Effectiveness
The IT Staff Augmentation model allows business owners to pick and hire selective resources for the project’s duration. This means they don’t need to pay for resources they have no use for, they can control how much they spend on building their team, and they can better stay within budget constraints. Moreover, since you are hiring talents directly from an IT staff augmentation agency, you won’t need to spend on onboarding, training and other expenses.
Enhanced Risk Management
Enterprise-grade IT projects have many potential risks like technical challenges, regulatory compliances and possible attacks from hackers and other exploiters. IT staff augmentation allows organizations to build a dedicated development team with experience working on such projects or handling such situations professionally. This helps reduce the chances of a project being at risk and improves the guarantee of successful project delivery on time.
Challenges of IT Staff Augmentation
IT staff augmentation provides many benefits that fit your business or hiring requirements. However, before you finalize IT staff augmentation as your preferred model, you should also beware of the various challenges of IT staff augmentation. Here are the most common challenges regarding IT staff augmentation –
Integration and Communication Barriers
Integrating an extended team or staff with your in-house team might be more challenging and smoother than you’d want it to be. Differences in working styles, cultural beliefs, and communication gaps can all create hurdles to efficient collaboration and project time to market. You must establish proper communication channels and conduct team-building activities to incorporate a cohesive working environment.
Knowledge Transfer
IT staff augmentation is generally used for contractual hiring, and once their contract gets done, they would leave the project, taking their specialized knowledge with them. Before that happens, they can effectively transfer their knowledge to the internal team to ensure the project’s long-term success and stability. You should conduct knowledge-sharing sessions, interactive lessons and other knowledge-sharing methods to ensure effective knowledge transfer.
Data Security and Confidentiality
IT staff augmentation allows external developers access to sensitive company data, which can raise security concerns. Companies should ensure the right data protection measures and protocols to ensure strict confidentiality. Ensure the IT staff augmentation service provider adheres to industry practices like signing NDAs and conducting regular security audits to safeguard sensitive information.
Conflicts from In-House Team
In a practical setting, augmented staff can tick the in-house team in the wrong ways, which might feel threatened by the presence of outsiders. Hence, as a manager or an owner, you must assure your in-house team of their value and importance and foster a positive work environment for in-house and extended teams. You should show the core team that the extended team are instruments to help them focus on their core duties as the extended team handles the rest. Besides, you can also emphasize a co-learning opportunity.
Resource Availability
Sourcing the right talent at the right time can still be challenging. IT staff augmentation has become a famous model, and other companies (your competitors) would also be headhunting the same talents as you are. Hence, acquiring the right skills at the right time for your project can take time, especially during peak seasons. This can cause delays in your project’s time to market, which you should consider before committing to this module.
Measuring Augmented Staff’s Performance
Since augmented staff work remotely from their location instead of physically from your office like your in-house team, monitoring and measuring their performance can get trickier. However, if you implement the right performance metrics, declare project deliverables clearly and audit their performance every two weeks, month or any comfortable frequency of your choice, you can easily overcome this challenge.
Final Words
Navigating the benefits and challenges of IT staff augmentation can be difficult, we hope this blog helped give you some clarity on the matter. Keep these pointers in mind and make the right and strategic decision for your staffing requirements.