7 Signs That Scream “You Need Staff Augmentation!”

You’ve spent considerable time, money, and energy developing your business. You’ve carefully assembled your tech team to fit your company’s current needs. Also, you try to anticipate your future projects and their necessities as accurately as possible. However, things can change in business anytime, so you have to be flexible and quick.

Staff augmentation can be a terrific way to handle these changes and successfully address the challenges they bring.

What exactly is staff augmentation?

Basically, it’s a strategic partnership with a team of professionals who possess specific knowledge and skills that complement and enhance your tech team. It’s like extending your team but without actually hiring new employees. You can find more details on staff augmentation here.

So, how do you know you need it?

7 signs you need staff augmentation

1.   You have a small team tackling big projects

You have a great team of developers who do outstanding work. However, you also have large or several projects that may exceed the capacity of your team’s size. Overload due to too many tasks and responsibilities can result in reduced quality, delays, loss of focus, and missed business opportunities — a recipe for disaster. 

Through staff augmentation, you can quickly scale up the number of team members, lending your in-house developers a helping hand from skilled professionals — a recipe for success.

The best thing is that you can easily reduce the number of members of your external team when your workload decreases. Just as easily, you can quickly scale up your team when your business is booming.

2.   You’re constantly racing against the clock

Technology companies often work on projects with tight deadlines. If your employees are under tremendous pressure to meet the due date and delivery seems impossible, it’s high time to consider staff augmentation.

Also, this outsourcing model can be beneficial for your company as it accelerates time to market of the products you’re developing. If you have a great idea but it takes you too much time to bring it to life and launch it, your competition may overtake you. But if you rely on staff augmentation, you can improve productivity, efficiency, and overall speed to reach your final product earlier.

3.   You need experts, and you need them now!

Current business dynamics imply constant changes and challenges. This sometimes means you need immediate access to tech experts outside your company. The good old traditional recruitment process of job posting, resume selection, interviews, tests, documentation, and so on doesn’t cut it anymore. It can take forever, and you have no time to waste.

Staff augmentation provides access to experts and experienced professionals that can join your team immediately. It’s also useful when you have one or more of your team members away for an extended period of time and need someone to step in.

4.   You need a specific skill set

Say your company has taken on a project that requires skills your in-house tech team lacks. Or you have a client who suddenly has new demands, or needs more output. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to find someone with a specific technology talent because that skill is rare in your region.

Even in this case, you can resort to staff augmentation to find the right experts for your project wherever they are. And once you’ve achieved the desired results, you can easily terminate the collaboration, only to re-engage them if the need arises again.

5.   You’re struggling with your project

Sometimes, a team working on a project for a long time can get stuck without any idea how to successfully complete the project. Certain stages of a long-term project require a particular skill or thinking outside the box to move forward and achieve the goal.

Thus, through staff augmentation, you can gain a fresh perspective, ideas, and experiences that will benefit your project in question and your company’s future business. Additionally, your internal team can learn a lot from these temporary employees.

6.   You’re wondering how to overcome skills gaps

Simply put, skills gaps open up when your team’s abilities and the ones your business requires to achieve the best results don’t align.

To stay competitive in the market, it’s crucial to adapt your business to new trends. You’ve built a strategy to implement new technology or just started your business’s digital transformation. Whether tech is your core competency or not, you’ll need different skill sets in various fields of expertise depending on your projects.

Since these skills are required per project, it doesn’t make sense to waste money, time, and energy to train your internal staff in these skills. Therefore, external developers’ services can go a long way in helping you close those skills gaps.

7.   You need to be in control from start to finish

Another benefit of this model is that your project stays in-house. Just because you’re short-staffed and working on a constrained budget doesn’t mean you can’t deliver a high-quality product or service. Since the temporary developer becomes a team member, you can supervise every step of your project’s development from start to finish.

This is especially handy when you need to track every change, shape every detail, and manage your costs to ensure the best possible outcome.

What’s next?

If you recognize your company’s current situation in any or most of these descriptions, it’s about the right time to consider adopting this outsourcing model. It can be tremendously advantageous for your company, in-house team, project, budget, and competitiveness in the market.

However, do your homework and research all the pros and cons of staff augmentation. Also, carefully evaluate your business plans and determine the specific skills you need. Pay attention to every detail and your budget. And finally, consider contacting a staff augmentation company to ensure you find a trusted partner and have the best experience.