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15 Mar, 2023

Staff Augmentation vs
IT Project Outsourcing

Development -Digital Marketing – Staff Augmentation

By Subodh Bhalerao
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When a company’s IT department or a software firm needs to save costs, reduce project timelines, or go beyond the capabilities of its in-house workers, they frequently turn towards technical staffing firms for assistance. As a strategy to bring in outside expertise, IT service providers may recommend a range of outsourcing engagement models, such as staff augmentation or project outsourcing, or even managed services. This Staff Augmentation vs IT Outsourcing includes several elements that needs to be considered while you hire developers. While all of these alternatives can supply you with qualified engineers or designers to aid your development team, it focuses on a deadline-driven project, you should be aware of certain key differences between them.

Let’s look at some of the key differences between Staff augmentation vs IT outsourcing to see which one best suits your current staffing difficulties and ongoing software development requirements.

What do we understand by “Staff Augmentation”?

The process of recruiting temporary employees to assist with your business projects is known as staff augmentation. Organizations are increasingly turning to staff augmentation to satisfy their needs in the face of today’s growing business and diverse skill requirements. As needed, this solution offers hourly and/or part-time software engineers to support your in-house team’s software development outsourcing cycle. This cuts down on time-consuming sourcing and hiring processes and makes it easier to fill high-demand, short-term positions. 

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

IT staff augmentation outperforms traditional employment in many situations, especially when time is of the essence.

The following are some of the benefits of staff augmentation:

  1. Cost-effectiveness: You won’t have to worry about the hiring process, setting up a workspace, or giving extra benefits to your new software developers.
  2. Flexibility: The staff augmentation method is appropriate for quickly achieving essential business objectives. It allows you to scale up and down resources according to your needs.
  3. Scalability without effort: Recruiting more workers or parting ways with them is substantially easier with staff augmentation than with traditional methods because all of the bureaucratic impediments are taken care of for you.
  4. Experts in the technology arena: Software organizations that provide staff augmentation services either have available software professionals with years of experience or can readily hire developers due to local market saturation and a well-polished recruitment method.

Drawbacks of Staff Augmentation

  1. Training: Your augmented workforce may need to be trained to follow your company’s internal processes and adopt the culture.
  2. Management capability: With more employees, there are more individuals to supervise. Even though they should be straightforward to manage with little training and coaching, you’ll still need the ability to manage more staff.
  3. Adding New Employees to an Existing Team: Adding new employees to an existing team always slows things down for a while. When new employees get to know your company and processes, your team may not function as efficiently as you expected.

On the other hand of Staff Augmentation vs IT Outsourcing companies:

IT Project outsourcing differs from staff augmentation in various ways, and it has its own benefits and drawbacks. The significant feature between project outsourcing and staff augmentation is that with staff augmentation, you acquire technology resources while maintaining direct control over your team (along with the risks of a potentially negative outcome), whereas, with outsourcing, you pay for a specific, predetermined outcome while sharing the risk with the outsourcing vendor while giving up direct control over certain aspects of your business operations.

What is “ IT Project Outsourcing”?

IT project outsourcing enables an organization to use the resources of another company to complete whole projects. In some instances, this can take the form of “out-tasking,” in which specific project responsibilities are outsourced to a sub-team staffed and supervised by the outsourcer.

The benefit behind outsourcing your IT project 

  1. Cost advantages: The cost savings that outsourcing provides are the most obvious and visible benefit. You can complete your task at a reduced cost and with higher quality.
  2. Increased Efficiency: When you outsource your business requirements to an outsourcing partner, you gain access to their years of business experience as well as their ability in completing complicated outsourced projects. This leads to increased production and efficiency in the process, which benefits your company’s bottom line.
  3. Save on technology and Infrastructure: Outsourcing minimizes the necessity for infrastructure investment because the outsourcing partner is responsible for the business processes and hence provides the necessary infrastructure.
  4.  Minimize software development risks: By partnering with a partner and allowing people to assist you with challenges, you can avoid any risks. When an issue arises, a group of professionals with a diverse set of talents and expertise will ensure a larger number of feasible solutions.

Drawbacks of Project Outsourcing

  1. Loss of control: If there are any delays, you may not realize it until it is too late. Changes in team members that are unexpected and uncontrollable will likewise be out of your hands. One of the biggest drawbacks of project-based outsourcing is the lack of control. And the consequences could compromise project completion. 
  2. There is no fixed cost for the project: One of the most evident disadvantages of the project-based outsourcing approach is that you may be forced to pay whatever the vendor demands or risk not getting the job done at all. In many client-offshore team engagements, the contract serves as the only driver of the partnership. Of course, the solution is to preserve a favorable clause in the contract or work with firms that are culturally receptive to the idea of fast-shifting engagement models in the client’s favor.
  3. Prone to Security breach: There are concerns about security in this model. Trade and corporate secrets may be exposed depending on the nature of the undertaking. If the contractor also works for a rival, this can be a problem. Another problem is confidentiality, and organizations must exercise extreme caution when outsourcing procedures such as payroll, medical transcriptionist, and insurance information.

Choosing the best delivery model can be a difficult task. The considerations discussed above might be included in a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. While some businesses are comfortable making this decision on their own, others may benefit from the guidance of an IT consulting firm.

If you need a flexible staffing solution that allows you to bring in outside technical expertise as needed, with the augmented staff you will be able to quickly integrate with your existing team — whether for the duration of a project, during specific stages, or for a final software review — staff augmentation may be the best option for you.

Whereas, IT Project outsourcing could be the right engagement model for your organization if you don’t mind giving up direct management over a project or don’t have the managerial resources to cope with increased employees. While project outsourcing has some nonignorable drawbacks (lack of quality control and communication concerns), it can help you save money by providing your in-house programmers more time to focus on their most critical development activities.

In simple words, the world of IT outsourcing is brimming with possibilities for putting your ideas into action. Hence these differences will help you to figure out the comparison over Staff Augmentation vs IT OutSourcing process in a comprehensible way. If the above-mentioned outsourcing methods do not fulfill all of your demands, you may always contact a consultant or a software development company to discuss your requirements.

Feel free to contact us if you find yourself in a case where you could require a staff augmentation service.

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