If you are the IT manager or CEO of your company and you get an urgent IT project that you are sure your team cannot handle on time, you have a few options to consider. These are:
- Employing more people – not viable, since you have to train them
- Outsourcing to another IT organization – You won’t be in full control
- Letting your in-house IT team do the job – they will fail to meet the deadline
- Augmenting your IT team with experts from outside – BEST OPTION
IT staff augmentation helps when you have an urgent IT project. If you do not want to use an outsourcing company, consider a temporary employee.
Instead of bringing in a temporary employee, giving them a workstation and all the perks, why not just outsource the entire work so it can be done remotely?
It is all about who stays in full control of the project. When a temporary staff joins your dedicated software development team, you hold the reins.
Here are the 7 main benefits of using IT staff augmentation:
1. Your business saves money
Augmenting staff are experts that you hire on a temporary basis, with all of the benefits of an employee. However, when the term you had hired them for expires, you let them go. You can think of it as a hire-on-need basis.
The key thing is … you hire an IT expert. Therefore, your company does not have to foot any on-boarding costs.
The cost is not even the problem here, but the time is. Imagine going through the pre-boarding, on-boarding, training and finally, the transitioning to a new role. That could take many weeks, and time is what you don’t have!
You also don’t have to spend resources on interviews and the entire recruitment and hiring process. The experts that you bring to join your team can start work almost right away.
If you have an urgent IT project, augmenting staff can help you meet the deadline easily.
2. You remain in control of your IT projects
You are going to remain in control of your IT project, again, an obvious benefit as opposed to when you outsource. ‘
The experts joining your team for a short period will work under your direction. That way, you are fully responsible for the results.
Keeping an eye on your company’s operating costs is very important. It means keeping a tighter control on manpower, because for a startup, paying employees is expensive.
When you know you can hire experts on a short term basis at will, you have peace of mind.
Since you cannot prevent employee turnover, if you lose an employee, you can try staff augmentation to fill the gap, at least until the urgent work is completed.
3. You can access a large pool of experts
Because of the fast changes that happen in the IT world, it might be hard for you to keep your IT team up to date.
You can take advantage of the augmented staff services that can help you fill this gap very well.
When you hire such a person, you are getting an all-rounded professional in the respective field.
Instead of having to pay a trainer to train your IT team, just hire a temporary employee who already has the skills.
Training your in-house team is costly in terms of money and time.
4. Faster scalability
When you need to scale up fast, you should consider using staff augmentation because it has unique benefits.
When the need to grow fast comes, hiring more permanent employees is going to cost you a lot of money. For instance, hiring a software engineer costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost time, since you can take more than 45 days to on-board that professional.
But there is a better, easier and more feasible option – using staff augmentation services! Because the staffing needs differ from time to time, having to hire every other time can be costly for a small-to-medium business.
Knowing that getting a temporary employee is a phone call or two away gives you peace of mind, since you will discover that hiring need not be costly.
5. Easier communication
In any organization, communication is the driver of productivity. Unfortunately, when you outsource your IT work, communicating with the outsourcing company always faces hitches.
When you bring experts on a temporary basis to your in-house team, you make it easy to communicate your business ideas, expectations and everything else.
6. Get an input of new ideas
When you are dealing with the same in-house team all the time, it will be hard to get new ideas from them.
The company culture is too deeply ingrained in them so they think in a certain way. When you bring in another expert on a temporary basis, you can get fresh ideas. Such ideas are going to take your business ahead in a big way.
7. Get an expert rather than a generalist
What do you need help with? Assuming you need a specialist in big data, that is whom you will hire!
If you have an urgent software engineering job, get just the right person, and not a jerk of all trades. Once the work is done, they will go back to their company.
Conclusion
When you use IT staff augmentation providers, you are going to save money, and time. You are getting an expert in their field, who is ready to hit the ground running.
If you run a small to medium business, you will find hiring experts on a need-to-hire basis is the best option, even to outsourcing or remote contracting
