What is It Staff Augmentation? An Efficient Solution to Extend Your Dev Team

The market expansion and profit increasing, the maximum use of competitive advantages, and the adaptation to new realities and consumers’ requirements make owners of companies implement complex information technology solutions and diversify production. Hence, the need to increase the flexibility and creativity of staff. Firms spend a great deal of time and money on employees retraining courses, trainings, and seminars. Moreover, nobody can guarantee a result that would meet the expectations. How do you solve a staffing problem? How do you cope with the lack of employees’ qualification and technical skills? How do you quickly launch a new solution and start making a profit? We’ll discuss all these issues in this article.

• Staff augmentation business tactic
• Staff augmentation firm
• Staff augmentation benefits
• It-staff augmentation process

Staff augmentation business tactic

The economic history of the late 20th-century covers the worldwide events and casualties affected by today’s business processes. This was the time of business globalization and the advent of an outsourcing strategy. Сorporations aimed to increase the economies of scale by expanding new territories and diversifying production. So, corporations discovered they could get additional flexibility by focusing on the main advantages and delegating the rest of the work to vendors, who would make it better and keep the cost down as much as possible. Corporations started outsourcing the duties that were necessary for general management but were not specifically related to the main business, such as accounting supply, data processing, internal distribution, security, and maintenance. Technology development and the arrival of new economic relations triggered outsourcing transformation.

The beginning of the 21st century is associated with the active growth of telecommunications infrastructure and the spread of the Internet. These events were closely related to IT or “white-collar” outsourcing development. As against manufacturing outsourcing, hired IT workers had the opportunity to choose working hours and the company to work for. Suppose, the growth of so-called “white-collar” outsourcing brought the new tactics of doing business - it staff augmentation or it-contracting services.

The technical/IT staff augmentation tactic is designed to simplify the process of a company’s technological development without direct hiring of employees and retraining existing ones. A company applying for staff augmentation services gets the opportunity to extend in-house team by renting employees with the necessary set of skills from an IT contractor on a short-term or long-term basis. The IT contractor is fully responsible for the quality of work and the qualifications of the rented employees. An IT vendor provides hired staff with an equipped workspace and required resources.

Staff augmentation firm

I’m going to talk about it-staff augmentation process and benefits based on our company example (Active Bridge has been providing it-staff augmentation services for more than six years.).IT staff augmentation firm is a kind of go-between for the employer and the employee. Unlike it-recruiting companies, all employees of the staff augmentation firm are hired employees and work for the firm on an ongoing basis (A client selects candidates from the pull of IT vendor employees.). The activity of the firm and its employees are governed by an employment contract and existing legislation. So a customer applying to the staff-augmentation company for additional human resources establishes legal relations with an IT vendor, not with IT vendor’s developers (employees). The staff augmentation company is responsible for all the hidden work of recruiting staff, checking data, and paying salaries. But the customer is still responsible for the project launch and promotion.

Staff augmentation benefits

Our team experience makes it clear a staff augmentation tactic is a win-win. Both a client and an IT vendor get benefits from cooperation. Our customers have commented about these key benefits.

• Time - saving

  The first and main purpose of the cooperation with an it-contractor was saving my time. This cooperation relieved my company from excessive financial expenses and time expenses on hiring new employees and retraining the staff. (Alex G., CEO/Founder CabLook Taxi)

• Financial gain

  Their staff are as competent and productive as the three times more expensive people and deliver more code per dollar than the three times less expensive people. No infrastructure investment, no additional costs on having employees. (David R., Founder/CEO at Lifelinker)

• No geographical limitations

  Active Bridge drives our remote engineering team at Def Method. Collaborating with their engineers has kept us delivering and running tested features in an Agile fashion across multiple countries and time zones. (Joseph L., President/Partnership Director at Def Method)

• High-quality and full integration

  They bring excellent Agile and TDD software development practices to our team and are effective and efficient collaborators. They are very experienced running software projects but equally proficient in adapting to our internal processes. (Ben L., Co-founder DaisyBill)

It staff augmentation process

As a whole, IT contractors have the same recruitment process, but some nuances depend on the financial specifics and the legislation of their home country. IT staff augmentation process at Active Bridge covers three main stages.

• A customer sends a request with the basic requirements for the developer (skills set, knowledge of needed technologies and programming languages, etc.). If the customer doesn’t have any technical requirements, they provide basic information about the project.

• After meetings or correspondence clarifying all project information, our specialists select the best candidates and arrange an interview with the customer. The customer conducts as many interviews as necessary to determine the candidates’ accordance or their replacement.

• After the client company has chosen the candidate, it concludes the** staff augmentation contract** or work-for-hire agreement with the IT contractor. This agreement is contracted for specific tasks, and the IT vendor has to report all findings and makes recommendations directly to the management of the customer. Any written code or any intellectual property created by the IT vendor’s developers are the customer’s property. The contract also indicates the main provisions, rights, and obligations of the parties and their implementation rules and the procedure for dispute resolving.

It-staff augmentation tactic is a simple and convenient solution for increasing staff flexibility and get a new idea/project run. The evident solution of a team extension is to attract skilled professionals who are ready to start work immediately. Staff augmentation tactic is aimed to extend the knowledge and skills of your work team so smoothly that it does not notice their colleagues are remote contractors.