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How to Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Model for Your Business

All businesses, whether it is a startup or an already successful company, search for opportunities to reduce costs and maximize the results. A lot of them resort to outsourcing their projects or hiring in-house teams.

But sometimes these options don’t bring the desired results, and not all companies are able to handle specific types of tasks. This is when staff augmentation will be a great solution:https://doit.software/blog/staff-augmentation.

What Is the Staff Augmentation Model?

Staff augmentation is an outsourcing service when a certain software company hires one or a few developers on a contract basis who will join an existing team and help to handle tasks quicker.

The hired developers can work from anywhere in the world and still help with achieving desired business goals. It allows the team to quickly find and have a person they need, with the required skills, for the short term, or long term, if needed.

So the staff augmentation model is the process when the outsourcing company contracts, hires the personnel. Most people consider offshore staff augmentation when there is a lack of in-house skills or professionals that are required for a certain type of project.

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IT staff augmentation will help you find the right IT talent for your project. The vendor can manage the recruiting, communication, and training process, but you have to know for sure who you’re looking for or what candidate you need to join your team.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation Model

There are a lot of reasons why businesses and companies use software development staff augmentation. And we are going to go through the main of the benefits of this outsourcing model:

It Is Budget-Friendly

One of the major reasons why companies like to use the staff augmentation model is because it is cost-effective. Different countries have different standards of living and different salaries.

So if you hire a person from a country where living costs are not so high, you can get someone in your team with the required skills at minimal costs, which leads us to the next benefit.

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It Lets You Access a Larger Pool of Talents

Sometimes it’s hard to find a candidate with the required skill set in your region or even country. Resource and staff augmentation will let you find and hire the best talents from around the globe.

It Lets You Get New Ideas

When your company or business has a fixed team, you have only access to their knowledge and experience.

But when you start to think wider and open your company’s doors for team augmentation, you get access to new people, with different experiences, knowledge, and skills, which will result in getting new ideas for successful project development.

How to Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Model

When the company or business decides to expand its team with skilled professionals, it is important to understand how exactly to choose the right staff augmentation model. Here are a few tips:

Research What Your Staff Needs

Do you want to integrate external professionals into your existing workforce? Start with researching what your staff requires, what skills or professionals the team lacks in order to work better and show better results.

Do you want to use IT staff augmentation for a completely new, different project? Then start with researching the project itself. You have to know which skills, experience are needed in order to succeed in a certain type of project.

The thing with staff augmentation is that no projects are alike, and for every project, you’ll need a different set of skills, and that’s why it is important that you understand whom you need.

Research the Provider

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When you did the previous step, and now understand whom you’re looking for offshore staff augmentation, you can contact the vendor for providing what and who you require.

There are a few things that are significant to keep in mind during the process of choosing and interviewing for staff augmentation:

Estimate the Provider’s Local and International Market

Depending on the project or your team’s requirements, you’ll need to examine what onshore or offshore staff augmentation options are available for you. For this, you have to know the specifics of your project in order to access top technical expertise around the world.

You’ll want to partner with the right vendor that has the connections and experience to hire and manage remote staff.

For example, let’s imagine that you need to find a developer for a SaaS project.

For this, you will need to study where this branch is more spread if you have experts in your country or region, or maybe you should consider outsourcing SaaS development to another country – much depends on your budget and management skills.

Look Into Company Experience

It is important to make sure that the provider really has the experience and knowledge that you need for your project. You can ask for their portfolio to see some examples of what they can do.

If you are searching for a specific skill to fit the specific type of project, don’t hesitate to ask about that as well. This will let you better understand if they will be able to develop exactly what you need or not. Choosing the wrong technical partner will make you lose precious time and money.

You can also look for reviews on the software company on the internet, or find out who their clients were and ask them for feedback. This will show you who you’re dealing with and analyze if the vendor’s work ethic and skills are what your team really requires.

Analyze Your team’s communication methods

A lot of people may underestimate this step, but it is actually a really important one. How can you expect to get the best results if you hire someone whose way of communication is completely different from your team’s?

This critical factor can determine how the work will be done. It is important to have transparent, simple, and honest communication, which won’t interrupt the workflow but will only make the process more efficient.

If you consider hiring someone from another country, you should be prepared that they may have different “correct methods” for communication at work, different traditions, and mentality.

And not always it will be easy to understand or implement them into your business. So research beforehand about the specifics of communication in different countries and choose the ones that will fit you better.

Examine their English language proficiency

We understood that communication methods may differ but what about language proficiency and barriers? Before you make your choice, make sure that the person can not only provide the required services for your project but also the required English language proficiency.

Your team won’t be able to work with someone who doesn’t understand what you are trying to say, therefore won’t be able to do the tasks correctly.

Also, if the person doesn’t know either your native language or English on the needed level, they won’t be able to fluently express their thoughts and ideas. This will also lead to declining quality and efficiency.

Timelines

It is always easier to plan the work processes with the team from the same city or country, but what if you decided to choose offshore staff augmentation? It definitely makes everything harder but not impossible.

Check beforehand how the time zone in the provider’s country differs from yours. It will help you imagine better if and how you can make your remote cooperation work and make sure that the person or team that you hire can meet your timeline without compromising quality and can keep up with the development schedule.

Security

When it comes to data security, you don’t want your project’s information leaked. For this, you have to make sure that the people you hire sign NDAs.

Checking the employee’s previous experience, about which we wrote a few steps above, will help in preventing you and your team from having someone not reliable beside.

But along with checking the employee’s background, it is also recommended to provide training about intellectual property and data security procedures.

The people on your team should understand the importance of using cybersecurity tools, and having limited access to your client’s personal information, confidential data, etc.

When you make sure that the people you hire understand this, sign NDAs, and don’t have a background history with stealing personal data or information, you can include them in your company and working details and processes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we want to highlight the most important thing to remember while considering staff augmentation – there is no one-size-fits-all.

The point is to research and understand exactly what your company or business needs and cooperate with people who can provide you with the required skill set, experience, and knowledge.

For this, it is critical to check your potential vendor’s previous works in their portfolio, the reviews from their clients or people they worked with, and their background.

It is also important to not forget that every person is individually different in where they’re from, how they communicate, etc.

But it is your responsibility to choose the person that can not only perform well while developing your product but can also bring something new to your team, express their ideas and help you get the best results in the long run.

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