IT Staff Augmentation: Working Principles Guide, Types, and More

Staff augmentation model implies to quickly expand your in-house IT team with skilled specialists and empower business capacity for solving your tech tasks effectively. When time is vitally important, especially when seeking mid-to-senior-level developers or niche experts like Scala developers or Big Data engineers, recruiting in-house can be too slow. In such cases, staff augmentation offers a swift solution, providing the talent you need to meet project demands.

As an experienced IT staff augmentation company, we’ve crafted this article to guide you through the key aspects of staff augmentation, its advantages, and how it can benefit your business.

Staff augmentation is a type of an outsourcing IT cooperation model where a company expands its in-house staff to augment their engineering capabilities for succeeding with tech tasks by temporarily hiring one or several outsourcing IT specialists. These engaged professionals integrate seamlessly with your internal team, working alongside your full-time employees to fulfill specific project needs, typically on a short-term basis.

The vendor cares about your team augmentation, meaning selecting competent engineers who previously worked on similar projects and sending their CVs to you. You (or your company's C-level executives) can interview the chosen experts and sign a contract if hiring them.

Resource augmentation is one of the approaches that helps to distribute an IT workforce between businesses. Its aim is to help you find programmers (or other IT specialists) for a certain time and fill in the talent gap in your team. However, for longer-term projects, you might consider alternative models such as a dedicated team or project-based development. It’s also possible to start with an augmented team and transition to another model as project needs evolve — most workforce augmentation providers are open to such flexible arrangements.

Within staff augmentation, two cooperation models with engaged tech specialists can be identified:

• On-demand staff augmentation. You need part-time or task-based software engineers with specialized expertise. These experts can work on your product individually or support your in-house technical team for a temporary period.
• Dedicated development team. You require a dedicated development team to handle specific project tasks and collaborate with your internal engineering team. Optimize your development budget by onboarding a self-managed team on long-term agreements.

As you seek flexible staffing solutions to keep up with your evolving project demands, you’ve likely noticed the rising popularity of IT staff augmentation. This approach is not just a trend; it’s a strategic move that’s driving the rapid growth of the global software market.

Given that the average time to fill a tech position in the US is around 44 days, many businesses are seeking faster, more efficient alternatives. As a result, more and more companies now rely on staffing firms to fill IT positions, highlighting the popularity and effectiveness of this approach.

With the IT outsourcing market projected to reach $541.10 billion by the end of 2024, it's clear that businesses are increasingly turning to flexible staffing solutions like IT staff augmentation. It is expected to have $118.95 billion in 2024, and its market share is forecasted to grow to $142.37 billion by 2029 to meet evolving technology needs of the businesses around the world.

The advantages of a resource staff augmentation project range from the obvious ones, such as no hardware or software development costs, no office rent or taxes, to faster and much more cost-effective hiring. Let's look through other pros for the concept of staff augmentation.

You don’t need to apply to recruiting agencies or take up your internal recruiters’ time (as well as team leads’ one to check test tasks and interview candidates). The staff augmentation definition dependent on your business needs might help you save hiring resources. However, to obtain manpower for your project, you should be oriented to the vendor’s time.

The period to hire augmented employees is determined only by the experience area of the staff augmentation firm (as more experienced firms with specialized knowledge can identify and match candidates more quickly). For example, at Cleveroad, clients typically receive the appropriate candidates in 1-3 days.

If full-time specialists’ employment is outside your plans and budget expenses, you should think about hiring an augmented team. The cost of services offered by staff augmentation companies depends on hourly rates, including office rent, hardware, software, and training expenses. For all that, their price is typically lower than for in-house development services.

Estonia should be noted as one of the top areas for outsourcing and outstaffing IT development due to its favorable quality-price ratio, thriving technological environment, including a big pool of tech experts, and lack of language barriers.

With workforce augmentation, you may hire as many IT experts as you need, and the augmented team is simple to scale up and down. You may start with two iOS developers, two QA engineers, and a UI/UX designer but only work with iOS or Android developers afterward.

The resource augmentation definition is also customizable in terms of budgeting: you can agree to a payment plan (weekly or monthly), hourly rates, and other points (such as sick days or vacations) with the augmented vendor.

If you outsource web development or software development, the vendor will take care of every detail. However, in case of a staff-augmentation choice, you can personally assign tasks, plan sprints, and fully control the process via corporate project management tools. For example, Cleveroad’s project managers use the following instruments as Jira, Confluence, Trello, and others to manage software development tasks ensuring that developers are always in touch and able to report directly to you.

The high productivity is a distinctive feature of staff aug, meaning the team is totally focused on your project, dedicating their time and effort to it. So, their efficiency level would be higher than in an outsourcing team that can manage several projects simultaneously. This is another reason why IT staff augmentation services are beneficial to use.

Flexible hiring allows companies to expand their operations on a trial basis without committing to a full-time workforce and risking failure or investment loss. Team augmentation services provide growing businesses more alternatives by allowing them to hire on a project basis to evaluate their market acceptance. Additionally, utilizing offshore staff augmentation or nearshore staff augmentation can help businesses scale quickly by accessing skilled professionals worldwide while maintaining cost efficiency.

The staff augmentation role won’t be appropriately played, if we forget the key challenges that the companies can face.

The first and the most common employee augmentation challenge the clients can face is the language barrier. You can get misunderstandings during the development workflow because of the inconsistent level of English. However, you can avoid this problem by checking the vendor’s English level yourself, consulting with a company representative, or speaking to each staff member. Cleveroad IT experts have a proficient level of English, ensuring clear communication and minimizing misunderstandings throughout the development workflow.

Another issue to solve is the time zone problem. It may also be controlled by establishing a suitable meeting schedule that allows you to set up communication properly. This way, the resource and staff augmentation meaning will be more valuable. Cleveroad addresses the time zone challenge by developing tailored communication plans that align with your schedule.

We prioritize holding meetings at times that are convenient for you, ensuring smooth collaboration despite geographical differences. Additionally, our robust project management office ensures that all aspects of your project are effectively managed, keeping everything on track regardless of location.

A poor developer's work results may cause project delays, expense overruns, and severe security risks for the end-user. Managers that prioritize cost reductions over other criteria are prone to this problem, but there are simple methods to avoid it. Companies may verify whether their engineering team is well trained and capable of completing their allocated work by studying and collecting feedback from these companies' previous clients. It should be done to match the best staff augmentation requirements.

Cleveroad, as a reputable IT staffing provider, prioritizes quality assurance and thorough screening of developers to ensure that our clients receive top-tier talent. We have a proven track record of delivering successful projects and exceeding client expectations.

Security is a key concern since the staff aug model entails engaging a third party and integrating them in internal operations. Clients' and projects' security and privacy are vital and must not be endangered.

At Cleveroad, we undertake frequent security audits to address the problem of security threats and hazards. Moreover, our experts follow all protocols for obtaining NDAs signed after employing the augmented staff to guarantee total security.

Technical proficiency gaps can arise when team members lack the necessary skills or experience to complete tasks effectively. This can lead to delays, errors, and decreased project quality. To mitigate this risk, it's essential to partner with an outsourcing vendor that has a robust screening and evaluation process for their developers. Leveraging domain-guided data augmentation can further enhance the capabilities of augmented teams by exposing them to a wider range of data and scenarios.

Cleveroad addresses this challenge by conducting thorough technical assessments and skill evaluations to ensure you receive software engineers that will align with your project requirements. We can also provide dedicated project managers to oversee the development process and maintain open communication with your team, ensuring that your project goals are met in a proper way.

Staff augmentation can be a valuable strategy for businesses seeking to scale their IT operations efficiently. By supplementing your in-house team with external experts, you can address specific project needs, bridge skill gaps, and accelerate time-to-market. Understanding when to leverage staff augmentation services is crucial for maximizing its benefits.

Outsourcing essentially simplifies the hiring task offering companies the most common relationship models for such a situation: staff augmentation vs. IT outsourcing. The most common distinctions of staff augmentation and full IT outsourcing models are given in the table below.

Cleveroad presents companies with both outstaffing services and outsourcing teams to hire. In most situations, recruiting outsource specialists is reasonable because:

• It lets to adapt the project to dynamic plan changes
• There are no expenses for hiring, administration, or training processes
• Specialists with solid experience in outsourcing IT development can assist you
• The outsourcing cooperation model is easily adaptable to your business needs

However, there are cases when resource staff augmentation services are more fitting and necessary. They become indispensable when you require specialized skills or expertise on a temporary basis, need to rapidly scale your team up or down, or prefer direct control over the augmented personnel.

You have an in-house team. Employee augmentation means you extend an already existing in-house team in order to obtain more people capable of performing your workflow tasks or filling the expertise gap finding a tech talent with a specific stack (for example, MEAN or LAMP) competent in specific IT fields (automated QA, back-end development, blockchain, IoT, data science, etc.)

You need to expand the team fast. If you need to choose the right local person with expertise in IoT, Dart, deep knowledge of healthcare software development, or something similar, be ready to search for a while. The outstaffing model will help you save time for finding a professional — you just need to contact the vendor, look through the developers' CVs, and interview them.

You have a tech-savvy manager on your side. Working with a resource augmentation model means doing management on your side. You stay fully in charge of product development and team management, which means you have to be both a good manager and a tech-savvy one. However, in most cases, augmented staff reports to the company's CTO or PM with enough experience.

You need better communication with the team. The staffing augmentation team will perfectly suit your requirements in case you want to totally control your project, knowing every team player that would daily report to you. They’ll also be a part of the in-house team subordinated to you.

Staff augmentation is ideal when you need to retain control over your project and manage your team directly. However, if you're looking for a more hands-off approach, where an external provider takes full responsibility for project execution, IT outsourcing might be the better option. Understanding the differences between staff augmentation and full IT outsourcing can help you choose the right strategy based on your specific needs and resources.

Cleveroad is a Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) outsourcing company that provides IT staff augmentation services since 2011, including full-cycle mobile app and web development services.

Having gathered a solid experience in this sphere, we want to tell more about how the staff augmentation process works in our company:

• Initial contact — starting technical staff augmentation process, you can contact us to expand your in-house staff. The managers obtain and analyze requests. Then, they schedule another call with your company to discuss the details (such as required devs qualification or what is a staff augmentation contract, etc.)
• Choosing tech specialists — when the requirements are precise, we choose the suitable specialists with the appropriate skill set. Their CVs are sent to you to consider.
• Interview — after you approve the CVs, the selected specialists have to pass the tech interview to check their skills. Sometimes interviews are divided into two stages - with the CTO and then with the CEO or product owners.
• Signing a contract — If things go well, we sign a contract and involve the selected developers in the project.

The specialists we provide have good communication skills and an Upper-Intermediate to Advanced English level. They're usually middle or senior-level engineers or team leads if there's a need to oversee the team's work.

Our team has succeeded with a lot of staff augmentation projects, and we want to share with you the most vibrant examples:

• Versatile Video-On-Demand Platform. With the help of our IT outstaffing services, our Danish client accelerated their digital transformation and expanded their reach to a wider audience through a modern VOD platform.
• Appointment management system for in-home care. Our client, the US nursing home provider, augmented their development team with our healthcare IT experts. It helped our client to efficiently develop a new appointment management system for in-home care.
• B2B reward-based cashback service system. By outstaffing services, our client efficiently accessed the necessary expertise to build and launch their robust cashback service system within budget and timeline constraints.
• Field services system for trading activity. Our client, a European cocoa trading company, used staff aug model to expand their development team to develop a cross-platform solution to effectively manage the cocoa trading and distribution.

Here is Henrik Loop, CTO at Blockbuster, gives feedback about IT staff augmentation services delivered by Cleveroad.