9 Mar, 2023

Dedicated Teams vs Staff Augmentation?
Which is a right choice for you?

Development -Digital Marketing – Staff Augmentation

By Sazinga Team
Project seminar to team members

One of the most popular IT outsourcing models is a dedicated team. It gives you the advantages of outsourcing while offering you the features and feel of in-house staff. However, for a company that does not want to change the entire software development team, the dedicated workforce can be too much of a commitment. Staff augmentation is here to help in the situation. To find how the staff augmentation helps, continue reading Dedicated Teams vs Staff Augmentation to understand better.

There are some key differences between Dedicated teams vs Staff augmentation that you should examine before choosing your software outsourcing approach.

What do we understand by “Staff Augmentation”?

Staff augmentation is the process of hiring interim staff to help with your business projects. With today’s growing business and different skill requirements, organizations are increasingly turning to staff augmentation to meet their needs. This provides hourly and/or part-time software engineers to provide the backbone to your in-house team’s software development outsourcing cycle as needed. This avoids lengthy sourcing and hiring processes and facilitates recruiting highly-demanded roles that may be needed on a short-term basis. Dedicated team models have certain similarities but also some major differences and they are listed out in Dedicated Teams vs Staff Augmentation. In a dedicated team model, you invest in engineering resources while maintaining control over your team. When you are hiring a dedicated team, you’re acquiring a predetermined, particular result and sharing the risks with the vendor.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

In many circumstances, IT staff augmentation outperforms traditional hiring, especially when time is of the essence.

The advantages of staff augmentation include:

    1. Cost-efficiency: You won’t have to deal with the hiring procedure, setting up a workspace, or providing perks to your new software specialists.
    2. Flexibility: The staff augmentation technique is ideal for meeting critical business goals rapidly. You can always scale up and down resources as per your needs.
    3. Scalability without effort: When opposed to the traditional technique, recruiting additional personnel or parting ways with them is significantly easier with staff augmentation because all of the bureaucratic hurdles are taken care of for you.
    4. Experts in the field of technology: Because of the local market saturation and a well-polished recruitment procedure, software companies that provide staff augmentation services either have available software specialists with years of expertise or can easily employ them.

Drawbacks of Staff Augmentation

  1. Training: It’s possible that you’ll need to train your augmented workforce to follow your company’s internal processes and embrace the culture.
  2. Capability in management:  With more employees, there are more people to oversee. Despite the fact that they should be simple to manage with minimal training and coaching, you’ll nevertheless need the capacity to manage more employees.
  3. Bringing in New Team Members:  Adding new employees to an existing team always causes things to slow down for a while. Your team may not function as efficiently as you hope when new employees get to know your organization and operations.

What does “Dedicated Team’ means?

The terminology “dedicated team” in the IT world refers to a remote software development team that is deployed to your project on a full-time basis, with the outsourcing vendor acting as the facilitator. The Dedicated Team concept has emerged as an excellent cost-cutting and speed-boosting tool for firms who aren’t getting projects done at the pace, price, or quality they want with their existing resources. 

Since Dedicated teams are most commonly engaged in software development projects, the composition of the teams typically includes everyone you need to build, test, and release apps successfully. Though there is no such generic structure of the dedicated team, however, they consist of the following stakeholders- Developers, QA engineers, UI/UX designers, Business Analysts, and Project managers.

Benefits of a Dedicated Team

  1. Cost-Effective: Hiring a nearshore tech team is typically less expensive than keeping local experts on staff. It can also save a lot of time and money in the recruiting process. A Dedicated Team provider manages the process of hiring and can locate a professional team much more quickly than you could on your own. 
  2. Highly talented pool: Each software development firm has its advantages and drawbacks. Many companies have a wonderful product or service, but they struggle to find skilled professionals among their in-house teams to meet their clients’ expectations.
  3. 100% team engagement: You may be confident that the professionals you engaged will work entirely on your assignments if you hire a full-time staff. Unlike other Outsourcing models, where IT specialists alternate between multiple customers’ projects, your dedicated teammates are solely focused on your duties and are just as interested and motivated as your own staff.
  4. Transparency and direct communication: Many companies don’t like outsourcing models as they are not transparent. Different time zones and other dividing lines are no problem for a dedicated development team – JIRA, Trello, Slack, Zoom, and other communication and tracking technologies are available to help. 

Drawbacks of a Dedicated team

  1.  Not suited to short-term initiatives: For long-term projects with changing requirements and specific goals that take months or years to complete, the approach is ideal. In all other circumstances, it is preferable to jump to Staff augmentation.
  2.  Does have specific standards that must be met: Companies must have a clear view of the capabilities they require before pursuing this hiring model. The more specific their requirements are, the more likely they are to assemble a team of difficult-to-find professionals from scratch.
  3. The hiring procedure takes time: In the Dedicated Team Model, recruitment is normally done from the ground up, which means that profile definition, recruitment, interviews, and onboarding will take time. If you require additional resources right away, this is not the greatest alternative.

Which one should you choose?

Through a dedicated team and staff, augmentation is similar, they are not interchangeable IT outsourcing models.

On the one hand, a dedicated software development team is the best option if your organization lacks any technical skills or needs a team for a new project. Sub-projects within larger projects are treated similarly. Staff augmentation isn’t going to win it in these situations.

Staff augmentation, on the other hand, is ideal for swiftly obtaining needed skills for an ongoing project. As the scope of your project changes or people leave, the need for new software developers can become critical. It can take a long time and a lot of money to find the perfect employee with relevant experience. Software development firms are likely to have on-hand expertise or an efficient recruiting department and procedure to quickly fill any gaps in their workforce. The dedicated team concept is inappropriate in this scenario.

In simple words, the world of IT outsourcing is brimming with possibilities for putting your ideas into action. If the above-mentioned outsourcing models do not meet all of your requirements, specifically in choosing Dedicated Team vs Staff Augmentation Team, you can always contact a consultant or software development business to discuss your needs and solutions.

And if you find yourself in a situation where you might require a staff augmentation service,  feel free to contact us.

Related Posts