All About IT Staff Augmentation
In recent years, many information technologies (IT) departments have sought to increase their agility, overcome short-term capability deficiencies, and/or accommodate the impact of hiring restrictions by utilizing staff augmentation arrangements with IT service providers or by contracting directly with independent contractors. As a temporary strategy, this approach has several advantages compared to the alternative of directly hiring staff.
Under a staff augmentation model, the cost of hiring for temporary requirements and disengaging once those requirements have been met can more than offset the higher cost of engaging more permanent resources. Moreover, staff augmentation requires minimal contracting effort, has a simple cost model (rate times hours worked), can scale up or down quickly, and has minimal impact on the existing operating model of an IT organization.
- Rapid access to missing capabilities and skills
- Accommodate staff shortages due to unexpected events
- Avoidance of hiring / de-hiring costs
- Costs scalable to demand
- No impact on the operating model
- Easily contracted
- Cost model transparent
The Importance of IT Staff Augmentation for an IT Organization
In the 21st century, IT Staff Augmentation is considered one of the most important tools for an IT organization to stay agile in a rapidly changing environment. Today, with technological advances and globalization, it is possible to have international remote teams easily working on projects together.
Staff augmentation is the new buzzword on the IT job market with more and more global IT businesses switching from in-house development to remote hiring or IT staff augmentation.
This flexible outsourcing strategy enables an organization to hire IT talent globally and manage the augmented team directly. IT Staff augmentation offers IT organizations an opportunity to get qualified, customized employees whenever needed without the hassle of engaging directly with staff and eliminating long duration of training and interviews, thus saving on a lot of money and time.
Besides selecting the ideal candidate, IT organizations can also increase or cut down the augmented team as and when needed. It works to the advantage of an organization to be able to add dedicated skilled technical resources to its in-house development team on a short or long-term basis.
Hiring skilled and trained IT talent has always been a challenge for IT companies, along with the struggle to retain employees after training them. While there could be an efficient team handling different client projects, multiple projects coming in at the same time make it necessary for the additional workforce to handle them. IT staff augmentation helps organizations to be ready for projects even if their in-house team does not have the time or the required application and management skills.