Top IT Staff Augmentation Services

Q: What is the difference between managed services and staff augmentation?

This model allows businesses to quickly bridge gaps in their current projects with the help of skilled professionals. * The concept of managed services implies that a significant part of the hardware and software "leaves" the enterprise to the service provider. By investing in managed services, companies are able to outsource infrastructure and processing of information flows to a service provider, and retain only business processes and control over the provider's activities. * Staff augmentation is one of the most flexible outsourcing models, where a business hires outside talent to boost the performance of its internal team on a temporary basis.

Q: What is the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing?

Whether to augment your staff or outsource your IT project depends on your current team’s capacity and your project goals. Those companies that have a strong internal IT team and who have reliable, responsible management, staff augmentation may be a good choice. For companies whose IT team already manages a full load and who need a project done fast and with less internal management, IT outsourcing may be the best option.

Q: What is the difference between staff augmentation vs time and material model?

The Time and Material model is suitable for projects that require customized solutions. In fact, these are all cases when a client asks for something from the series of “a modern and convenient mobile application”, “I want wow, but I don’t fully know how”, or when the product is innovative, all ideas are from scratch, so research is required to determine the optimal result.

Q: Is staff augmentation important?

Staff augmentation is one of the most flexible outsourcing models, where a business hires outside talent to boost the performance of its internal team on a temporary basis. This model allows businesses to quickly bridge gaps in their current projects with the help of skilled professionals. IT workforce growth companies offer highly skilled employees such as software developers, quality assurance engineers, project managers, system administrators, system and business analysts, designers, DevOps specialists, and others.

A full-time worker with an annual salary of $100.000 costs employers an average of 23% or even 30-50% in some countries. So the right option to choose is an IT staff augmentation services company.

In accordance with Statista, staff augmentation services were raised from 5.2% to 6.3% in 2018-2020.

<h1>Top IT Staff Augmentation Services</h1>

The Difference Between Staff Augmentation and Delivery Teams

Staff augmentation is when you are hiring a dedicated developer through a third party. It’s like extending your team with specialized staff to meet business objectives.

What is IT Staff Augmentation?

The Staff Augmentation model is a type of separate service, and it lies in the fact that we find talented people according to the client’s requirements in order to integrate them into the client’s processes, where these people will achieve the goals set by the client's company for themselves.

Additionally, you get access to any niche expertise - you hire only the best niche specialist. The staff you are hiring have experience in technologies associated with your project.

Pros

Niche Expertise: You hire only the best niche specialist. The staff you are hiring have experience in technologies associated with your project.

Full Control Over Team: As the employer company, you completely control every aspect of the project and your remote development team.

Flexibility: When the project is completed, you can end the partnership and revive it in the future.

Cons

Management Overhead: a large number of off-site specialists need to supervise their work, and it leads to an executive load.

Requires Training: The need for additional training to understand the company’s internal processes.

What Are Delivery Teams?

For long-term projects with support throughout all stages of the software development life cycle, the staff augmentation model might not be right. In such cases, a seasoned project manager, specialized software developers, and quality assurance specialists can be useful.

This model allows you to conceptualize software and give the rest to an external team.

If you lack skilled professionals or want to scale up your in-house team quickly, then staff augmentation is the right choice. But, if you wish to delegate your project to a reliable partner, then choose a delivery team.

Pros

Fast Response: The delivery team can start development immediately after you conceptualize the software.

Less Load on Management: You give the responsibility of managing projects to the outsourcing company, which eases the load of in-house executives.

Cons

Limited Control: Most of the load relies on the provider’s experience. Managers have limited control over tasks.

Not Suitable for Short-term Projects: It is less cost-effective. Some companies can refuse to take on short-term projects or charge a premium for the same.

Types of Staff Augmentation

Before considering hiring an IT Staff Augmentation service, you have to define the project's duration, because you can hire an outsourcing team for a short-term project. IT Staff Augmentation will be suitable for long-term projects with experienced professionals.

Basic staffing service

This solution will be useful when the company needs staff in its development team to carry out basic tasks that don't require special skills to execute them. This type of service is suitable for not urgent projects.

Skills-based staffing service

The IT Staff Augmentation can offer a team of expert specialists in certain fields, with specific skills to resolve the specific needs of the client.

Highly experienced staffing service

These are teams with highly experienced specialists, with critical skills and abilities for hard and large-scale projects. They work agilely, with the flexibility to answer the client's needs and deliver results of the highest level.

How Does Staff Augmentation Work?

Staff Augmentation successfully combines the advantages of outsourcing personnel and the convenience of the company's own internal staff, allowing you to quickly meet the need for missing workers.

An increase in staff is convenient to apply in both cases: both when specialists are needed for a short period of time and for long-term work.

Short-term staffing increases are typically used by companies during the high season or during peak days when their staff resources are not sufficient to meet demand; during vacations when it is necessary to replace employees at their workplaces and keep productivity at the same level; to replace a specific employee who has gone on vacation or sick leave.
Long-term staff growth is used for more global strategic purposes. For example, when a company needs to take on additional specialists for a large project. This is typical for project businesses like software development companies. Often, as part of a long-term expansion, highly specialized employees are attracted, specialists in rare technologies, which are meaningless and expensive to keep on staff.

When to Use Staff Augmentation Services

There are a lot of scenarios when your organization can use staff augmentation.

Strategic: You can strategically use additional flexible staff as a way to get a competitive advantage. For example, you are increasing your team’s agility or increasing the speed of delivery of a project.
Specialized skills: It can be useful when you only need specific skills for a short period of time, such as tech setup, brand, and logo design.
Increased capacity: Staff augmentation is useful to fulfill a temporary need for increased everyday work, for example, for a high period of business, to increase production

In recent years, staff augmentation in big demand, among companies and organizations across the world.

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Keys to successful collaboration

When choosing a software development partner, make sure it's flexible enough to accept changes as your business grows. This applies to many aspects, such as scalability, adoption of new technologies, offering different pricing models, knowledge adoption, etc.

First, the company must be able to quickly adapt to your plans and strategies and scale easily as your business grows. Second, technological progress has become so fast that the technologies you use today may be obsolete tomorrow. Therefore, it is important to choose a software development company that can keep up with innovation.

<h2>Keys to successful collaboration</h2>

What to look for in your Software Development Partner

Choosing the right software development partner is a complex process.

If you want your partner to ultimately live up to your expectations in terms of quality, professional mindset, and cultural fit, then you need to specify certain standards from the very beginning for choosing a software development company.

Communication

In fact, ineffective communication can span many aspects, including lack of emotional intelligence, cultural differences, etc. But let's approach this from the other side, paying more attention to understanding the needs of the clients. The desire to clarify all the nuances with you ensures the comfort of your further cooperation with them.

Company size

The size of a software company, as well as the scale of its projects, is of great importance. If the provider is too large and works primarily with large businesses, it may not pay enough attention to your specific needs. If the company is too small, it may not have enough experience to operate on such a scale.

Pricing

Pricing is certainly not the first criterion to look at, but it plays an important role in the decision-making process.

Specialization

You should choose those partners who have experience in your field.

Experience

Before starting cooperation with a specific partner, make sure that the company has practical experience in similar projects in your industry.

Feedback from customers

When choosing a software development company, visit popular review platforms such as Clutch, GoodFirms, AppFutura, and more to get real customer reviews of various providers.

Flexibility

Knowledge of agile development techniques is a must for any software development company today.

IT Skills Available for Hire at Agilie

Experts in key programming techs

Experts to complete a software development cycle

Software development deals with issues of quality, cost, and reliability. Some programs contain millions of lines of source code that are expected to execute correctly under changing conditions. The complexity of software is comparable to the complexity of the most complex modern machines and space projects.

Programming technologies include:

Analysis and problem setting
Design
Writing program source code
Program testing and debugging
Tests and delivery of programs
Program support

All this can be managed by experts at Agilie.

Launch, analytics, and maintenance. As soon as you understand that there are no serious defects left in the software and it is completely ready to launch, it's time to officially release the finished high-quality software product.

At this stage, a technical support specialist is included in the process, who will give feedback to users, provide advice, and correct shortcomings in accordance with their wishes and comments.

The Project Manager role is typical for a team that works on a project. The manager is responsible for the implementation of the project or idea within a certain period of time by the forces of his team, using certain resources and in the quality required by the customer.

To summarize, Project Manager:

Communicate with the customer.
Collects requirements.
Processes requirements - split them into smaller ones.
Sets tasks for his team, monitoring time and resources.
Coordinating and supervising the progress of work.
Managing the project budget.
Maintains design and technical documentation.

All business analysts have hard skills:

Knowledge of the software life cycle and basic software development methodologies at a basic level. Now for Scrum, which remains the most popular methodology for projects.
Knowledge of methods for assessing labor intensity and prioritizing tasks.
It is also very good for an analyst to be able to manage risks, identify them correctly and in time, plan work with them, and communicate with customers.
Knowledge of MVP principles and the ability to correctly decompose tasks in order to bring valuable results in the early stages of projects.
Prototyping user interfaces.

Remote collaboration process at Agilie

Remote collaboration allows you to increase the work schedule of the company. Since employees work from home in a comfortable environment, in general, they can devote more time to work than in the office. Everything depends on their self-organization and discipline.

A remote business is not limited to hiring workers from the city where the company's office is located. There are no restrictions regarding geography - you can find valuable personnel with the required skill level both in the neighboring region and far abroad.

<h2>Remote collaboration process at Agilie</h2>

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FAQ

What is the difference between managed services and staff augmentation?

What is the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing?

What is the difference between staff augmentation vs time and material model?

Is staff augmentation important?