Facing a talent gap happens to every company. So, if some projects can wait for a new internal team member, there might also be an urgent need for a specific skill. This is when IT staff augmentation/IT outsourcing enters the game. Various strategies exist for businesses to fill skill shortages. Still, this article compares and contrasts two of the most common: staff augmentation VS outsourcing. Which should you choose, then?
Let’s look at the main differences between staff augmentation and project outsourcing to help you decide which strategy suits your staffing software development needs.
Staff Augmentation: What, How, Why?
In layman’s words, staff augmentation – employing workers with specific skill sets to help your in-house teams with tasks or projects.
A real-life example:
If your business has to deploy a new CMS but lacks a specific IT talent, consider staff augmentation rather than hiring and training new IT specialists. You can work with an AWS implementation provider, like Quintagroup, that offers qualified IT professionals with experience creating cloud-based solutions for companies. To ensure that they are a good fit for your organization’s culture and ambitions, we will carefully pick suitable candidates for you to consider. You can then interview and evaluate them. Once you’ve settled on a team, make a deal with Quintagroup to onboard the selected IT specialists in your project.
Staff Augmentation Pros
Staff augmentation can benefit your business both in a financial and education-related way. We singled out some reasons for you to choose it.
- Broader talent pool: Hire competent people with the skills and experience your in-house team might need to learn.
- Scale up: Without spending time recruiting and training new staff, you may easily adjust the size of your team to suit the project’s needs.
- Affordable option: Pay for the talents or hours you really use.
- Speeding up time to market: The more well-vested employees you have, the faster you will meet project deadlines.
- Simple hiring: Working with a vendor means avoiding the drawn-out hiring and onboarding processes. Staff augmentation makes it simple for you to add, remove or replace team members as necessary.
- Adaptable contract terms: From short to long-term, pick the contract length that best matches your project requirements.
- Compatibility with other cultures: When choosing an augmented team, you can evaluate how well they fit within the culture and objectives of your business.
IT Outsourcing: What, How, Why?
In comparison, staff augmentation refers to adding engineers to your development team to fill specific talent gaps, while outsourcing refers to hiring a complete development team to assist in developing your app.
Let’s take the already discussed real-life example: you can outsource the entire project or a part of it to Quintagroup software engineers, UI/UX designers, QA engineers, DevOps and other experts. Say you have an old content management system. Still, it needs redesigning or migration to modern headless CMS, and your team lacks such experts. Therefore, you can hand the project to Quintagroup, and we will do our best while working on it.
IT Outsourcing Pros
Check out the top outsourcing advantages for your business:
- Spend less: Outsourcing IT services saves money because it avoids the need to hire and maintain in-house workers. You can also manage your expenses according to your project needs by deciding to involve either a part-time IT worker or a full-time one.
- More expertise: Access a wider range of specialized talents and knowledge by outsourcing an IT team.
- Concentrate on the essentials: Outsourcing IT lets you focus on the main objectives and strategic initiatives.
- Less management hassle: It’s worth mentioning that IT staff augmentation requires internal management. In case of outsourcing, you delegate this responsibility to your vendor. Quintagroup will handle the process and ensure the desired results.
- Scaling and adapting: IT outsourcing simplifies scaling resources up or down in line with company needs.
- Higher security standards: To guard against cyberattacks and data breaches, Quintagroup employees implement robust security policies.
- A way to self-improvement: New workers will bring fresh perspectives to your company and share valuable knowledge with your staff.
- Risk management: By implementing disaster recovery and business continuity policies, IT outsourcing helps reduce risks.
Staff Augmentation VS Outsourcing: Comparison
Staff Augmentation |
Outsourcing |
|
Specialists |
Software Engineers, UI/UI Experts, BA, DevOps, AQA |
Dedicated teams of PMs, engineers, designers, testers, analysts, etc. |
Reasons for it |
Need for one or several IT talents to fill in the gaps |
Lack of in-house programmers for specific purposes/projects |
Management |
Project management is on the client |
Project manager provided by Quintagroup |
Working Culture |
A person or several people who will follow your company’s ethic |
Cooperation and knowledge exchange |
Scalability |
Might require some time to scale |
Easily scalable |
Suitability |
Your project requires a specific skill set, and you are willing to accept a new talent under your management. |
It can be a great option for full-cycle software development. Need to replace a previous vendor? We are at your service. |
Overall Advantage |
Cost-effective and flexible solution that enhances speeds up your product development lifecycle |
Increased employee commitment, deeper understanding of organization's needs, boosted performance |
Wrapping Up
Software developers are in high demand, yet there are not enough well-versed ones on the market. That is why finding staff members with the right skill set can be tricky for many IT companies.
Both staff augmentation and outsourcing have proven more effective than traditional hiring. You can keep costs down and significantly shorten the time to launch your digital product with either model while getting the expertise of highly-skilled talent pools.
Whether you should go for a staff augmentation model or a mainly outsourced one depends on your project. It is impossible to identify which option—staff augmentation VS outsourcing —is generally superior. You can, however, pick the one that best fits your case. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions; we would be happy to assist you in choosing the best one for your needs.
Use our outsourcing VS staff augmentation comparison to decide which solution suits your needs before adopting it.