IT Staff Augmentation: Benefits, Tips, and Best Practices

The success of a software development project often depends on having people with just the right skills on your team. But searching for the right specialists — or even outsourcing technical tasks to vendors — can take weeks, delaying development and eating up your budget. In such cases, you may want to consider staff augmentation.

This outsourcing model is one of the most common ways to quickly enhance your team, whether the project requires rare skills or just an extra pair of hands. But does this model work for all development use cases?

In this article, we share Apriorit’s experience on when IT staff augmentation is most efficient and how it compares to other outsourcing models. We also explore how your company can ensure the best outcome of team augmentation.

This article will be useful for product owners and project managers who are looking for development talents and are considering outsourcing.

What is IT staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is an outsourcing strategy that allows you to get additional team members for a certain project or task in a really short time. These specialists then act as your own team members under your management.

Hiring new developers in-house may take months of searching and negotiations. With staff augmentation, you can get new talent in just a week and leave all the hiring burdens and expenses to your vendor.

Staff augmentation can be arranged for any period of time depending on the type of your organization and your current business needs. Key use cases for this outsourcing model include:

• Starting development fast. When working on a project with tight deadlines, there usually isn’t enough time to hire and onboard in-house employees. Staff augmentation allows companies to quickly assemble new teams or enhance existing ones with rare expertise. 
• Rapidly scaling projects. When a business grows fast, it needs to quickly hire more developers to support its solution and fix bugs. Augmenting the team with extra specialists helps to avoid software crashes and provide quality services to your end users without interruption.
• Avoiding talent shortages. Competition for highly qualified specialists makes it challenging to hire a needed team member. Cooperating with a staff augmentation vendor helps you avoid dealing with talent shortages. 

Many companies can also find other use cases for staff augmentation that are tailored to their needs. Thanks to its flexibility, this outsourcing model can benefit businesses of any size and projects of any complexity. Now that we discussed how staff augmentation works, let’s see how it can benefit you.

Pros and cons of staff augmentation

Major benefits of augmenting your staff with the help of a vendor include: 

• Access to rare expertise. Staff augmentation brings experts to your team that previously worked on projects in different domains. They can bring unique experience and expertise to your team, both technical and business-related.
• Quick access to developers. Finding outsourcing specialists is much faster than hiring in-house, as the staffing vendor has already gone through the hurdles of assessing and onboarding developers. All you need to do is sign a contract with a vendor and get developers who are ready to work. 
• Cost-efficient capacity boost. With staff augmentation, you don’t need to worry about all the expenses that come with hiring in-house, including taxes, paid vacations, sick leaves, wages, bonuses, raises, workspaces, equipment, and so on. Everything is covered by your vendor, and you only pay for the work new specialists put into your project.
• Flexible team management. You can quickly scale your team up and down depending on your current business needs and resources without having to go through the hiring process or leaving some team members on the bench. Staff augmentation works great for expanding your team during the high season.

Focus on your business goals. Staff augmentation allows you to delegate responsibility for employees and their management to a third party while you focus on your business strategy and operations that are vital to your customers.

Relying on staff augmentation also comes with a set of disadvantages. Let’s take a look at them and see how we can help you mitigate them:

• Lack of specific institutional knowledge. Each company has unique processes, communication flows, and knowledge bases. Any outside developer will need time to adjust their processes and learn new things. For example, at Apriorit, we cooperate with our clients to work out clear technical specifications and make any required documentation and knowledge bases available to our specialists. This way, Apriorit’s developers can prepare for new projects and become useful to your team as soon as possible.
• Communication challenges. Communication with developers from a third-party company can be a challenge due to possible language barriers and cultural differences. That’s why it’s best to choose a vendor that shares cultural values with your company. Apriorit teams have been successfully working with clients from North America and Europe for 20+ years, communicating in clear English and adjusting our processes to satisfy clients’ requests.
• Tricky management and coordination. Managing new team members and team cooperation can get tricky if you don’t provide clear instructions. Outsourced specialists and in-house employees can get confused over their areas of responsibility, collaboration plans, access to company resources, etc. That’s why we as an IT staff augmentation company clearly define the role, responsibilities, and chain of command for each outsourced team member.

As you can see, an experienced outsourcing vendor can help you manage the key disadvantages of staff augmentation. However, you’ll still need to make some adjustments to your workflow to maximize the benefit of additional team members. Let’s take a look at staff augmentation best practices you’ll likely need to adopt.

Best practices for efficient staff augmentation

As in any type of IT outsourcing, the responsibility for augmentation success lies on both the outsourcing vendor and the client. Here’s what you can do on your side to make IT staff augmentation process efficient:

1. Define your expectations and deliverables. Realistic expectations are the first step towards a successful partnership with an outsourcing vendor. However useful staff augmentation is, it may not be able to cover all your needs and wants.

That’s why it’s best to figure out the following before contacting outsourcing companies:

• The scope of tasks you need new team members to do
• Required expertise and training
• Expected deliverables and deadlines
• Your budget for staff augmentation
• Cultural and other requirements (English proficiency, availability during certain times, etc.)

This list will make it easier for you to search for fitting vendors. Also, clear requirements help vendors better understand how they can help you.

2. Assess outsourcing vendors. Finding a vendor can be hard, as the IT market offers thousands of IT staff augmentation companies across the world. When you opt for offshore staff augmentation, location restrictions go away and your options are almost limitless. 

However, there are ways to shortlist vendors without hassle. Here are some tips:

• Ask for recommendations from your business partners and acquaintances who have already used staff augmentation for their projects.
• Check reliable listing sites like Clutch.co to read reviews from other clients and see whether a company has completed projects similar to yours.
• Assess vendors’ expertise based on case studies, blog posts, and other content. You can google for a particular topic you’re interested in and contact companies whose portfolios and content resonate with you. 

3. Sign a contract and NDA. Preparing documents takes time, but it’s an essential step in ensuring the success of your cooperation and protecting the interests of both parties. A well-defined contract sets clear expectations by outlining the scope of work, responsibilities, timelines, and payment terms, helping to avoid potential disputes and ensuring that both parties are aligned on project goals. 

A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is equally important, as it protects sensitive information like intellectual property, business strategies, and user data. This legal agreement prevents a vendor from disclosing or misusing confidential information. This way, you’ll be able to safeguard your company’s proprietary solutions and maintain your competitive advantage. An NDA also serves as a guideline for your vendor, helping them understand what kind of behavior and work ethic you expect from new employees.

4. Set up communication with outsourced specialists. As new additions to established teams, outsourced specialists need to understand whom to ask questions and to whom they should report. 

Define a clear communication strategy for outsourced specialists that includes:

• Communication channels your company uses (messengers, collaboration and project management tools)
• Established communication routines (meeting schedules, information to share on these meetings, reporting format and frequency)
• Contacts and availability of necessary employees (project leaders, subject matter experts)

With this information, outsourced employees will know what you expect from them and who they can ask for help when needed. In turn, your team will be confident in the abilities and actions of new team members.

5. Prepare onboarding and knowledge transfer. Effective onboarding and knowledge transfer ensures that new specialists quickly understand the project’s context, helps them become productive, and helps maintain consistency in the project’s quality and workflow. You can do this with the following steps:

• Prepare software documentation and make it available to new team members
• Set up knowledge transfer sessions
• Assign mentors to new employees
• Pay attention to questions and requests of outsourced employees

6. Encourage ownership in new team members. If you plan on using staff augmentation for a long-term project, it’s best to make sure that outsourced team members truly feel like part of your team so they are committed to the project’s quality and final results. Here’s how you can do it:

• Motivate new team members to show initiative and share their opinions on project challenges 
• Provide outsourced employees with project context and the big picture of your business
• Avoid micromanaging outsourced employees while keeping an eye on the results of their work
• Share regular feedback with specialists and the outsourcing vendor
• Create a collaborative environment between outsourced specialists and your in-house team

With these practices, you’ll help new specialists quickly integrate into your processes and provide value. 

How does staff augmentation work at Apriorit?

With over 20 years of experience in outsourcing software development and QA, we have mastered every common outsourcing model. You can use staff augmentation to quickly enhance your team with our experts in kernel and driver development, AI, blockchain development, cloud computing, reverse engineering, and more. We can also provide you with professional business analysts, DevOps engineers, and QA specialists.

When our clients choose staff augmentation, they usually walk through the following steps:

1. Initial contact and project discussion — Apriorit managers analyze your request and figure out how we can help. At this stage, we discuss what type of expertise you need: development skills, cybersecurity knowledge, experience with specific compliance requirements, etc.
2. Interviews with Apriorit experts — After we select specialists that satisfy your project’s needs, you can interview them to assess technical skills, work ethics, cultural fit, etc. 
3. Sign contracts and NDAs — We prepare documents that reflect our agreement on the scope of work, project duration, deliverables, and payments. NDAs with our experts ensure security of your data and intellectual property.
4. Work on your project — Once the paperwork is completed, you can begin onboarding new team members and they’ll start bringing value to your project as soon as possible.

This workflow allows us to quickly understand your business needs and provide you with expert assistance. Our developers and QA experts know how to fit into a new team and avoid process disruptions. With their help, you’ll enhance your in-house team and be able to deliver quality software on time.

Conclusion

Staff augmentation is an outsourcing model that allows companies to quickly add more specialists to their team, avoiding lengthy headhunting and hiring processes. This model is most useful if you need to acquire niche expertise or meet a tight project deadline.

At Apriorit, we have a lot of experience in forming outsourced dedicated teams and augmenting our clients’ in-house teams. We can help you significantly speed up your development while maintaining high code quality and reliable cyber protection.