What Is Staff Augmentation? — Use Cases And How To Succeed

Identify your company’s skill gap

Every business has a skill gap. Before augmenting your IT or software development team, it’s important to understand what your company’s skill gap looks like. This can be done through interviews, surveys, and observation.

Speak to your IT managers, look ahead to the company’s IT priorities and compare your team’s capabilities to those that will be needed over the next 3-9 months. Once you have an idea of the skills you lack, think about if they are short or long-term gaps.

Sometimes teams have short-term skills needed for a particular software modernization or digital transformation effort. Other times teams may have long-term skill gaps that will prevent them from meeting their current business objectives. Staff augmentation can help you bridge this gap - whether short or long-term.

PRO TIP: Assess both short-term and long-term talent needed within your IT team before reaching out to staff augmentation partners.

Choose the right partner

Choosing the right partner is perhaps the most critical step in any staff augmentation model. The software development partner you work with will either make your experience seamless or make you wish you had never decided to use outsourcing models in the first place. It really is make or break!

A few tips for finding the right staff augmentation partner:

• Your outsourcing vendor should fit your culture. If you are a very casual, modern startup, you may not want to work with a stuffy, corporate-focused augmentation agency. Make sure you get to know potential vendors through video chats.
• Do your research on the broader outsourcing market. Understand your options from hiring a dedicated team of developers to project outsourcing and beyond. For example, the right type of partner will be different if you’re looking for a single project manager vs a full team of software developers,
• Assess potential vendors’ credentials thoroughly. Don’t be afraid to ask for references and case studies. Take the time to look at reviews and speak to past clients. This may be the most important tip!

Read More: How to Choose a Software Development Company in 10 Steps

Try multisourcing

Multisourcing is the practice of using multiple suppliers for the same service. The goal of multisourcing is to improve quality and reduce cost by leveraging the strengths of multiple suppliers. This can also be a great way to decide which vendor you want to work with long term. Key benefits include:

• Increased competition: By sourcing from multiple suppliers, you are able to encourage more competition, often leading to lower prices for software development services.
• Risk reduction: By diversifying suppliers, you are able to reduce the risk of relying on a single staff augmentation provider.
• Improved flexibility: Multisourcing can provide you with greater flexibility in terms of delivery schedules and payment terms with your staff augmentation service providers.

PRO TIP: You can select two vendors and ultimately decide to work with the one that is better for long-term collaboration.

Make remote developers feel the effects of being with your local team

If you are working with remote developers, you will need to modify your management style and build a good relationship with every member of the team very intentionally. You need to constantly communicate to ensure both in-house teams and remote teams are in sync.

Anytime you are holding a Zoom meeting with your remote team, create some time for them to share about their hobbies, lifestyle, and interests. This will enable you to figure out what everyone has in common. It will also foster healthy relationships among the team.

PRO TIP: While it certainly isn’t as simple as inviting conversations during team meetings, this is a great place to start to build a culture of collaboration and openness that can really help to make the developers who were hired through staff augmentation feel like part of the team.

Ensure clear communication

Clear communication has the potential to improve your bottom line. Your team needs to understand the vision, mission, project requirements, and development process. It is important to enhance the communication process in the development cycle so everyone can buy into decisions and contribute effectively to the projects at hand.

PRO TIP: Make sure your project managers and team leaders are setting the expectation for the type and level of communication you expect from your team.

Embrace tools and technology

Leverage project management and team collaboration tools like Slack, Asana, Jira, Trello, and Basecamp to foster idea-sharing and track the status of your projects. The lack of communication may lead to miscommunication that can affect the entire project. Therefore, it is highly important to use these tools to improve operational efficiencies and streamline long-term project development.

Read More: Software Development Planning - Perfect Project Plan in 10 Steps