The need to reduce expenditures while improving operations continues to increase. This is made possible through constant technological innovations. This means that there are more and more IT projects that spring up by the second. Companies can either succeed or fail depending on the promptness, affordability, and efficiency of these projects. Choosing to develop the necessary skill set in-house, using the companys own workforce, can be both risky and expensive especially if the company has constantly changing IT needs.
This is where staff augmentation comes in. This process lets companies add skilled persons to their roster based on what skill sets are necessary to meet their goals. A staff augmentation agency will employ the appropriate staffing requirements as they see fit.
Advantages of Staff Augmentation
– Full control this method allows you to manage your company resources closely, including each member of the staff.
– Complete integration with internal operations â companies can efficiently integrate resources from staff augmentation with internal processes, as compared to having to align these with external contract workers. A worker can quickly learn the process of a company from the inside, which is better than having two individual organizations working side by side.
– Make the most out of current resources â As you add new skill sets to your company, you can leverage on both internal and external resources necessary for your projects.
– A team of specialists It is common to have holes and gaps when it comes to certain skills in your project team. Staff augmentation easily fills these gaps.
– Change is constant This applies to your companys needs, too. Staff augmentation can efficiently and quickly meet your changing needs as they happen. It is easier to increase and reduce resources as your demand fluxes.
– Reduce training costs You can make huge savings by not having to invest in internal training and skills development.
– Limit the burdens of your employees â This outsourcing strategy lets you avoid liabilities and increased expenses from direct employees.
– Get things done on time – staff augmentation lets you get the resources you need, especially for active projects that have aggressive timelines.
– Get employee votes In most cases, direct and existing company employees prefer a staff augmentation model than project outsourcing. This is because they feel less threatened by a few added workers than by having entire projects outsourced.
Disadvantages of Staff Augmentation
– The training required might still be intensive companies try to reduce the costs of training resources with the necessary skills, but there still has to be some training involved in bringing this manpower in especially in bringing them up to speed with internal operations, with knowledge of the domain, and with other tools and software.
– Internal processes have to be flawless When there are flaws in the internal operations of a company, the resources will be directly (and negatively) affected just as much as the internal employees would be. Process flaws can significantly influence how much (or how little) the company can enjoy the advantages of implementing staff augmentation practices.
– There arent economies of scale on the table When the need for resources goes up, the cost structure would not improve in the same way. This is because the addition of resources is often incremental and often founded on a per-resource-basis.
– A model that is centered on resources the goal of staff augmentation is to produce real results. A good firm can help in delivering these results, but ultimately, the responsibility and accountability for these results still lies upon the shoulders of the company itself. When purchasing resources even high quality ones companies still arent guaranteed end results, just resources. Internal administration and employees remain accountable for project planning, management, tasks, and delivery.
– Management overhead When adding more resources, the management overhead will also increase because of the increased need for supervising the bigger number of resources.
Distinguishing employees from contractors Some companies need to shoulder the issue of making sure that the resources acquired through staff augmentation are not construed as regular, internal employees.