4 Benefits of Using Staff Augmentation to Expand Your IT Team

Any successful business needs to have the proper tools and talent at its disposal. The right amount of talent can be a key factor in finding that Goldilocks level of staffing to accomplish your goals.

When these goals change, it’s easy to be caught with too few qualified employees, and bringing on new in-house workers to fill the gaps can be an expensive, time-consuming process. Should your goals change yet again, you may find yourself with too many employees and no easy way to downsize.

Enter staff augmentation as an affordable, flexible solution.

What Is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation is when you supplement members of your team, typically in IT or engineering, with additional employees who help build new products, provide support to current ones, or otherwise service the company. Although they may be distributed off-site, your management team oversees them, as it would any other employee.

Contrast this with the more traditional style of outsourcing, known as “professional services,” where these additional team members work under the purview of a contractor. They are often treated as contract workers, not full employees, and communication is typically indirect, which can cause delays and an inferior final product.

As U.S.-based programmers are in extremely high demand, many IT managers find staff augmentation more cost-effective than hiring an in-house employee.

The many benefits to this employee structure include:

1. Quality control

In a more traditional outsourcing model, you may have limited control over which team members are assigned to your projects and the quality of their work until the delivery of the final product.

A project may require a particular set of skills that aren’t applicable to other parts of the company. Staff augmentation allows you to shop around for that individual who can fill your exact need, without committing long term to that skill set.

This staffing philosophy helps put the best people in a room (virtual or otherwise) to troubleshoot problems and deliver creative solutions on time and on budget. This, in turn, results in the delivery of products that are optimized—and competitive in the marketplace.

2. Transparency

A typical outsourcing relationship tends to rely on an opaque and unreliable process:

• The contractor’s project management style may not be consistent with yours.
• You don’t know how they manage internal workflows. Are they using Waterfall, Scrum, Agile, or some other development framework?
• Your contract may guarantee you only a final product, nothing more. This does little to inspire confidence that the product will arrive bug-free and ready to go.

Staff augmentation allows for direct communication with and control of your remote team members. They can integrate seamlessly with your in-house staff, which allows you to turn on a dime, reassign tasks, and change direction whenever necessary.

3. No time-zone headaches

With effective IT teams, as in real estate, it’s location, location, location. A typical outsourcing location is far removed from U.S. time zones (India is 10.5 hours ahead of the East Coast). This temporal distance can cause some major headaches, including production delays, rewrites, and a final output of inferior quality.

It has been something of a surprise to many North American CEOs that South America is home to several thriving hubs of developers and engineers, particularly in Ecuador and Colombia. Known as “Silicon Vallecitos,” these hotbeds of IT expertise are just a four-hour flight from southern U.S. cities such as Miami, Houston, and Atlanta.

4. No hiring hassles

A staff augmentation firm does all the work of a traditional staffing agency—recruit, train, and vouch for the employees who will help bring your software to market. These workers are full members of your team, exclusively dedicated to you for as long as you need them. And if you need more of them, it is easier to staff up quickly than with in-house workers.

Augmentation can also solve the opposite problem—overstaffing. Once a project has been delivered, you may not need the same roster of talent going forward, forcing you to lay off otherwise gifted employees. Staff augmentation gives you the option to temporarily enhance your lineup on a per-project basis.

Consider Jobsity

If a distributed team sounds like the solution for your company, consider Jobsity, a nearshore staff augmentation firm that hires and trains top developers in Latin America for U.S. companies.

Our proprietary, eight-step hiring process vets all applicants for both technical and “soft” skills, such as emotional acuity and communication. English proficiency in speaking and writing is required of all employees. Every candidate has shown their ability to perform to your standards and adapt to your company’s culture.

You pick your team from our roster of more than 70 developers, all of whom are at the top of their field in technology, programming languages, and frameworks.

Ready to get started? Read our staff augmentation guide and discover how Jobsity has helped global brands such as Disney, NBC, and Groupon with staffing solutions.

Interested in hiring talented Latin American nearshore developers to add capacity to your team? Contact Jobsity: the nearshore staff augmentation choice for U.S. companies.