Not every day is quiet and peaceful when you work in software development. Sometimes, implementing a new feature takes longer than you expected. Making users wait for too long, especially if you’ve already announced the appearance of new functionality, will not improve your relationship with them. When you develop a new product from scratch, the urge to release it as quickly as possible is quite natural as well. The question is how to complete the work faster without making your employees feel exhausted.

With the ability to scale the development team effortlessly as you need, you won’t have to spend resources on endless digging in CVs and subsequent interviews. IT staff augmentation can be an excellent way to increase your development opportunities without losing your flexibility. Today, we’ll consider how IT staff augmentation works and discuss its major features.

When it’s Time to Enlarge Your Team

The risk of facing lack of resources is especially high for small and medium-sized companies or startups. It may not always be worthwhile to spend time looking for and hiring new employees. Especially when we don’t talk about regular work. For example, if you need to modernize a legacy system that your customer works with and you can't dissipate the efforts of your core team to solve this problem. That’s where IT staff augmentation may come in handy.

Augmentation means that you can enlarge your team by adding new staff members on a temporary basis. The specialists you hire this way will become a part of your in-house team for as long as you need and will cooperate with your staff members as closely as needed to solve the task you struggle with.

Let’s consider the legacy application example we mentioned earlier. Suppose your task is to develop a CRM app for a customer who also has a legacy database with tons of useful data he desires to keep. Your employee list may not include specialists with the required tech expertise. In this case, you can rely on staff augmentation and add to your organization somebody who’ll extract all required information from the legacy database, ensure that file formats are compatible with the new system, and integrate it into the data pipeline of your future software solution.

The vendor providing your organization with new members can quickly pick up a team that previously worked on similar projects and help you interview them. If you decide that their development skills fit your current needs, you will have nothing to do but to welcome them on board.

Read Also 3 Stages of Success or How to Hire a Dedicated Development Team for Your Business

Not everybody needs staff augmentation and if you can’t decide whether or not this path suits you, you can use the list below as a tip. Staff augmentation is for you if:

• You already have a development team. This one’s pretty obvious. If you don’t have an in-house IT department, you can’t expand it by hiring additional members;
• You don’t have much time. The best part about staff augmentation is that you can quickly pick as many specialists as you need. Do you lack four JavaScript and two PHP developers? Not a problem! Find a vendor, check developers’ CVs, interview, and hire them.
• You have experienced managers. Staff augmentation will expand your development team rapidly, which will change the usual course of things. The way your project managers distribute tasks and track their progress must be adapted to the new circumstances.
• You need people with experience. Software development skills have years to master. If you want results quickly, you don’t have time to train inexperienced developers. The good news is that staff augmentation organizations rarely include people who lack expertise in their augmentation lists.

Also, keep in mind that there are three major types of staff augmentation. Commodity doesn’t imply that you’ll be too picky in terms of employees’ specializations. Here, urgency is the primary driver and companies choose this way when they need someone to solve tasks involving manual labor, for example. Skill-based staff augmentation helps to fill the skill gap between the current and desired state of your organization. Still, this one is not so demanding compared to the highly skilled approach. In this case, you’ll cooperate with industry specialists who can cover a wide range of tasks, from brand design to data engineering.

How to Perform Staff Augmentation Smoothly

After you decide that expanding is exactly what you need and choose what type of it will better suit you, it’s time to start planning the whole thing. Usually, companies that provide staff augmentation services can share with you detailed information about how the entire process must be carried out. However, it’s always better to know beforehand to minimize the probability of any issues.

First, determine what’s wrong with the project. Everybody can face problems while working on something complex and speeding up everything is a natural desire. But you have to find your bottlenecks first. A good starting point is to discuss problems with your permanent development team.

The next stop is to specify the means of solving your problems. Suppose the overall pace of work slows down every time you need to test the system due to lack of testers. In this case, you can hire more experienced QA engineers. Analysis of specifics of your work will help to determine how many new professionals will be enough and whether you need short-term or long-term augmentation.

After that, you can research development companies providing staff augmentation services. You can find a dozen of them by a simple google request. However, it’s important not to rush. Signing a contract with the first development company that offers the lowest prices for augmentation is never a good start. You need to dig deeper. Such companies won’t tell you all their secrets since it can hurt their customers, but usually they share their expertise openly. For example, you can always check the portfolio page and see what types of projects a specific company successfully completed. If there are some matches with what you’re currently doing, you can look at this staff augmentation vendor closer.

If you think a specific company has required specialists and want to ensure they’ll fit into your team, you can perform interviews and negotiate the terms with the vendor. The interview will help you know the potential team members better and briefly assess their soft skills. Negotiations with the staff augmentation company are a good chance to clarify how much it’ll cost you to “borrow” a particular set of skills for a certain amount of time. If the terms are acceptable by both sides, you can sign a contract and peacefully watch your development team grow bigger and become more efficient.

Conclusions

Software development process, despite the apparent repetitive nature, can hold many unexpected surprises requiring non-trivial solutions. Sometimes, even an experienced team may get stuck on a task longer than planned. Here, it’s important to work smarter, not harder. IT staff augmentation allows changing your team size almost on-the-fly, which can be an excellent alternative to traditional hiring thanks to extreme flexibility.