The business and software development industries are familiar with software outsourcing. Companies have been researching ways to decrease their time to market for many years. Project outsourcing or IT staff augmentation services is the hottest term in the software services industry. The general trend of consulting with outside experts is one that every organization should consider because it might be challenging to find highly skilled engineers.
Although both IT staff augmentation solutions and IT software outsourcing can offer qualified engineers to support your development team on a project with a tight deadline, there are differences between these strategies that we will go over in this post.
Software Staff Augmentation
Employing temporary workers to fill in a company’s specific skill shortfalls is known as staff augmentation. Although brief, workers hired in this way are still considered business employees. This definition of staff augmentation is accurate that sets staff augmentation apart from third-party IT software outsourcing and IT staff augmentation solutions.
Contractors, freelancers, and consultants never make up the company’s official employees. Both staff augmentation and IT software outsourcing are very different from one another. With the latter, the business outsources duties to be completed by outside parties. The company temporarily hires individuals for IT staff augmentation solutions to work on particular projects.
Vendors of staff augmentation, however, merely offer expertise to execute specific tasks for your project. The primary distinction is in the management process. Whereas an IT software outsourcing vendor sets milestones and oversees the entire process alone, a staff augmentation provider supplies some developers, who your technical leader should manage.
Regardless of staff augmentation models or IT software outsourcing, these are non-negotiable. What elements must you watch out for while researching effective outsourcing of its development? This section addresses specific topics.
Choosing Software Staff Augmentation: Benefits and Drawbacks
Let’s focus on the benefits and drawbacks of the staff augmentation model to assist you in selecting the best model— IT staff augmentation services vs. IT software outsourcing.
Software Staff Augmentation Benefits
- IT staff augmentation services allow a firm to scale up or down its teams without the headache of finding, hiring, and then paying full-time employees. Vendors offer the company a skilled software engineer for specific tasks.
- The outside software engineering team collaborates with your internal team in person, with managers monitoring all interactions. As these newest team members are only working on a project on a short-term basis, your full-time personnel won’t have to worry about their job security or feel threatened by them.
- The technical and procedural variances resulting from IT software outsourcing a complete vendor team can make it challenging to align with your business’s goals and generate compatibility problems and hurdles. Contract engineers can quickly join the internal team thanks to staff augmentation.
- With outside expertise, you may swiftly fill skill shortages within your organization. By lowering general overhead costs and the associated costs of recruiting and training new staff, the IT staff augmentation services help you save money.
Software Staff Augmentation Drawbacks
- You must ensure that your management staff is equipped to handle a sudden surge of engineers. As additional engineers participate in the project, the time commitment may increase rapidly.
- Your software staffing company will give you access to the best-qualified applicants on their team within your budget constraints. Following an Agile approach will help, but almost always, you will need time to integrate with your team. You will need to dedicate time to onboarding to grasp your process. In the beginning, before your augmented workforce becomes familiar with your internal business procedures and norms, this can reduce productivity.
IT Software Outsourcing
Staff augmentation refers to bringing in people to complement talent needs, whereas IT software outsourcing is hiring an entire team to tackle a particular project. If you hired one engineer to replace this gap in your development team, it would be staff augmentation instead of IT software outsourcing.
However, if you recruited an entire development team to create your software, that would be considered staff augmentation. When comparing staff augmentation to IT software outsourcing, the employees hired under the latter model don’t become part of your office staff list; they instead stay independent.
IT software outsourcing companies are more accountable for the project’s quality and outcome. To achieve a successful relationship while outsourcing, it is crucial for both businesses to function on a foundation of mutual trust. The project’s success depends on how well the IT software outsourcing company comprehends the unique characteristics of the client organization.
IT software outsourcing: Benefits and Drawbacks
It’s time to distinguish the benefits and drawbacks of IT software outsourcing by contrasting it with staff augmentation.
IT software outsourcing benefits
- Costs: Like IT staff augmentation services, one of the main advantages of IT software outsourcing is cost savings.
- Management falls to the vendor: The responsibility for organizing, educating, and managing a remote staff falls on the vendor after the contract is signed. Since you are paying for their expertise, they are responsible for ensuring that their team produces a final product of the highest caliber.
- Top Talent: It is almost impossible for one organization to take on a wide range of positions such as Product Manager, Engineering Architect, Mobile, Cloud, and Data Engineer. And even if they could, creating a cohesive team would only be possible. Regarding IT software outsourcing, finding individuals with specialties and in-demand technical skills is a significant benefit. Even if they are not readily available locally, a seasoned IT software outsourcing company will bring the right talent to your project.
- Focus: Managers can assign more operational development duties to outsourced team members using an IT software outsourcing engagement model. As a result, they can engage full-time workers to work on meaningful projects or initiatives related to their employees’ areas of expertise.
IT software outsourcing drawbacks
- When you outsource a project, you provide the outsourced vendor and the offsite team they bring to the project’s direct administrative control. It could make it challenging to communicate with folks in other time zones. If you collaborate with a team abroad, you could encounter communication difficulties due to linguistic and cultural differences.
- By giving up direct control with this model, you can engage with staff, managers, and IT software outsourcing companies to attempt and determine who is in charge of what project components. It can take a lot of time and effort to fix coding standards that need to meet your strict development requirements or hidden technical debt from an external development team.
Staff Augmentation vs. IT software outsourcing: A Comparison
| Staff Augmentation | IT software outsourcing | |
| Duties and costs | The business pays for the additional employees’ hire, training, and provision of the required equipment and materials. | The IT software outsourcing provider bears the whole expense of the hired employees. To complete the project, the vendor also uses its tools and resources. |
| Purpose | To temporarily assemble a team or fill up specific gaps. Appropriate for unforeseen, long-term, and short-term projects. | You must hire engineering expertise to complete work the organization does not want to be done—ideal for short-term and long-term goals. |
| Workplace Management and Structure | Management efforts are needed. However, it enhances overall team cohesiveness and eases hiring difficulties. | Even though management is independent, the external team must integrate with the company’s personnel effectively. |
| Knowledge | The client independently verifies the supplement workers’ expertise and speaks with other staff members. | The committed outsourced team combines expertise in the outside market with particular insights into the company’s sector. The client needs to evaluate the resources’ caliber. |
| Onboarding | Since the customer has immediate, on-demand access to the resources and capabilities they need; onboarding happens quickly. | Projects can start once they have undergone extensive study, had their deliverables outlined, and had milestones established. Additionally, both parties must complete formal agreements before the project may move forward. |
Which One Fits You Best?
It can take time to choose the best technological partner. Several aspects are unique to your business, including your particular skill set requirements, planned growth (or contraction), project deadlines, and others.
Staff augmentation is your best option if you’re looking for flexible staffing that enables you to bring in outside technical talent and will seamlessly integrate with your current team and development procedures.
IT software outsourcing will be the optimal engagement model for your business if you need more technical software design procedures and sufficient technical expertise. While there are certain disadvantages to IT software outsourcing your product development, hiring an outside team will save you money over the long term and provide your team more time to focus on their most important projects.
In a Nutshell
Every organization is unique; you might choose software staff augmentation, IT software outsourcing, or a combination of the two based on your needs. The good news is that you can always change these engagement models as necessary as your business grows.
For every business, finding the right talent is essential.
Before beginning, it is generally helpful to have a direction in mind. It’s difficult to determine whether the approach—IT staff augmentation or IT software outsourcing—is superior.
What matters is that the model you select meets the current demands of your business and that the people you hire have the skills necessary for the position. You can either do IT staff augmentation or IT software outsourcing work for you.