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Staff Augmentation – Definition, Tips, and Advice by Bwit Talent

Discover the powerful concept of staff augmentation and how it can revolutionize your IT development. Uncover the benefits and potential it holds for your IT initiatives.


We'll guide you through the myriad benefits of staff augmentation, empowering you to make an informed decision on the best model to elevate your IT endeavors to the next level.


When should companies evaluate the option of augmenting their IT staff?


1) They have more work to do than internal staff to complete it.


2) They need to scale, staff up, and staff down. Flex your outsourced team around big new development projects or redirect them to maintenance jobs.


3) Another scenario is when a specialized skill or customization is required for a specific project only, and that knowledge is unavailable within the current team. The Company does not foresee a need to permanently have a person with this knowledge in their core team, such as SAP consultants or additional data engineers. Staff augmentation provides the convenience of accessing these skills for short-term projects.


4) European and US companies often turn to IT consulting vendors instead of grappling with the tight recruiting market in their home countries. These vendors can swiftly provide them with staff members, often at a lower cost, thereby easing the burden of internal recruitment.


5) Cost is a key aspect of decision-making and a source of competitive advantage. Start-ups and companies with projects that have a tight budget may opt for staff augmentation, which allows them to operate at a fraction of the cost, making them feel prudent and resourceful.


6) When there's a very tight delivery schedule and round-the-clock work is necessary, having a faraway development team for your project can significantly improve productivity. This model of staff augmentation is offshoring, which has the advantage of round-the-clock work on your project. However, it does come with a word of caution, and that is the large time zone differences, cultural differences, and language barriers.


7) Companies need a team that communicates closely and ensures understanding of the project or product's vision and objectives. In this case, companies prefer a nearshore model to augment their team with an external team within a 1-hour time zone difference radius of their home offices. This ensures better opportunities for the company's team to share the vision and understanding of the tasks with the augmented staff and more dynamic interaction, communicating changes and treating issues in real-time, which also allows the team to build a sense of a unified team.


8) The company wants to free their teams to carry out their day-to-day operations or key projects; their core is not IT, they are having difficulty keeping up with their systems, and their systems have become a source of frustration for employees and management, the maintenance costs have become inaccessible, money is lost in productivity. In any of these scenarios, companies should probably decide to fully assign the delivery of a project or support to an external team – Outsourcing.



To aid our clients in any of these scenarios, we diligently seek and assess potential candidates or teams based on their needs.


Depending on our clients' needs, we can hire web designers, mobile application developers, data scientists, software engineers, SAP consultants or other ERP consultants, quality assurance engineers, front-end and/or back-end developers, full-stack developers, DevOps engineers, etc.

Although companies can choose to have our project managers as part of the augmented team, the project's vision and direction usually come from inside the client's company, and it is shared and ensured by a PM or a Product Owner from the client.


What does staff augmentation mean to the day-to-day functioning of your IT department? That depends on the consulting company you choose, how they work, and the type of staff augmentation you decide to do, nearshore, offshore, or outsourced.


At Bwit Talent, for instance, we prefer when our clients wish to work with engineering talents directly because this helps build a relationship with the team and ensures an understanding of the requirements and goals earlier in the project's implementation. You can communicate directly with the team in matters related to the project as if they were your employees, involving them entirely in your project.


Your staff augmentation choice comes from how you wish to define it. Below are the general steps in our engagements:


1) Our account managers engage with your business and gather your requirements.

2) Once the requirements have been documented, our staffers start the thorough search for talent within our talent pool or outside, if required.

3) The staffers match the developers or consultants to your job based on your needs and budget.

4) Staffers perform an initial interview with the candidates to ensure they are suitable for the role

5) English communication skills are assessed to determine whether they are at the level required for the role.

6) The candidates take personality tests

7) We do a background check on the candidates

8) We present you a selection of viable options, usually within two weeks or less. You interview and select the talent that best suits your requirements.

9) You work directly with the people you have chosen as if they're your off-campus staff, handling daily direction, reporting, and project management.

10) You are sent a monthly bill for the previously agreed-upon schedule or effort. This amount is negotiated beforehand, so there are never any unpleasant surprises.


Recommendations


We recommend that you share a clear and reassuring staff augmentation definition with your employees. Explain exactly what the role of the additional staff will be and how that will impact day-to-day operations, project reporting, a chain of command, etc.

Emphasize that you don't plan on downsizing the number of people you employ on the company's direct payroll. This will ensure a smoother interaction and communication between your team and the staff augmentation team from the start.


Finally, we suggest that you do your homework before you begin your interviews and give your staff augmentation firm a clear definition of the projects and their meaning for your business goals. This will help you get your consulting arrangement up and running fast.

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