Outsourcing services are gaining growing popularity in all developed – and developing – markets as they offer numerous advantages for running a business. First of all, it saves money and time for the customer of outsourcing services, which is the main demand on the market regardless of the niche. Secondly, it offers flexibility – another huge need that many growing businesses seek in order to develop their company and optimize internal business processes.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of outsourcing services available and different models of outsourcing at all. One of the current trending outsourcing services is staff augmentation – especially staff augmentation services in Europe, where the market seeks opportunities to cut costs. We are going to explain to you how to define if you need such a service and how to find a reliable vendor when such a need appears.
Staff augmentation vs. outstaffing
First of all, let’s understand what is staff augmentation exactly. Staff augmentation means hiring certain employees – or a few of them – from an outsourcing company to add them to your current team, in most cases that one working on technical projects, especially in IT industry. These can be QA specialists, developers, project managers, data scientists, analytics, and so on. The main thing about staff augmentation is that you do not hire a team who will design and build your project from scratch, or work with provided technical specifications. You use your in-house staff, but power it up with third-party specialists who have proven expertise and experience and can help you receive a view from the side on specific edges of your project.
Outstaffing is often confused with the staff augmentation service. The most definitions of outstaffing you can find somewhere on the web refer to the same definition we have provided higher for staff augmentation. Nevertheless, in the real conditions, it doesn’t work as it is described. Outstaffing is always about hiring an entire team with professionals who will cover all processes related to the project – for instance, in the case of software development projects it means you outstaff not only back-end developers but also front-end, QA specialists, data scientists, DevOps, etc.
How to find out whether staff augmentation suits your business?
There are a few specific things that may point to that your business may need staff augmentation service to ensure the success of your current plans and ongoing projects. We have made them as a list:
- You run a complicated project. It can refer to almost anything: digitalization of complicated processes, set up or development of specific software solutions, cloud migration, etc. This especially requires attention when your team has no experience in such projects, but you want them to gain such expertise – here help from the trained professionals is required.
- You face staff lack or other staff-related issues with ongoing projects. It happens from time to time when companies face issues with their current in-house teams. Seasonal issues, growth of customer base, unload on your IT facilities – this all can come up as a reason to look for additional employees. As the hiring process is long and effortful, you can look for staff augmentation third-party services.
- You need an audit or a separate look at processes. An augmented professional won’t think of how to fool you – his only goal is to provide excellent service for your company as he represents his own company. Thus, if you want to get a source of objective opinion, you should look for staff augmentation IT services as the main IT outsourcing tool for such cases.
- You need a very specific professional. Sometimes, it comes out during working on a certain project, that your team lacks a man with a very specific – not to say unique – skill set or experience, and the need for such a professional is as urgent as ever. This is where staff augmentation may come as a magic wand for your business – you can find such a specialist for affordable compensation within days, not months as if you would have tried to hire him with your own efforts.
- The project is risky. We all know that risk management is important, but not all of us understand how important it truly is. This means going the extra mile in terms of managing risks is always a good idea when the risk is high. Thus, hiring augmented staff for the high-risk project is a good decision to back up your efforts and resources with the expertise of proven professionals in their niche.
- You need to contract the team here and now. If you provide services for third-party companies and you have a great contract coming up, but your customer may look for specific expertise in your team, or you know that you lack some specialists, you will have to use staff augmentation as a solution – because that’s the only thing that works in such thin time frames.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons that may push you to use staff augmentation services – especially if you work in high-tech industries where outsourcing has become extremely popular. The only issue is to find a reliable and effective vendor of such services who will become your long-term partner. We have a suggestion for that – look at Europe’s industry leaders, one of which is N-iX. This company gathers more than 2000 first-class professionals all around Europe and works with projects of any complexity regardless of the industry you are in – this includes software development, project management, outstaffing, staff augmentation, data analytics, integration, and so on.
