Biggest IT Staff Augmentation Challenges and Solutions for Your Business

What is IT Staff Augmentation?

By outsourcing qualified candidates, IT staff augmentation increases the strength of your internal team. Any company that is experiencing a talent or skills shortage can rely on another company or agency to fill the void. When a deadline is approaching and more hands are needed, when a company needs a specialized resource skilled in a particular tech stack, or in other situations where time is of the essence, staff augmentation makes sense.

To reduce their reliance on hiring and screening, businesses use outside personnel. They reach out to another company, sometimes across international borders, to provide their team with contract workers. Staff augmentation is a model that is continuously expanding due to its flexibility without the hiring burden, retention of the core internal team, and only use of outsiders as supplemental personnel. Additionally, it is practical and affordable.

What scenarios call for businesses to augment their IT staff?

• Cut expenses and increase savings:
  Staff augmentation makes it easy for cash-strapped SMEs to use other strategies to increase cash flow. Extended-term full-time employees (FTEs) may find themselves benched after a while if they are no longer required, which is unpleasant for the employee and costly for the company. Instead of making long-term commitments, businesses can concentrate on adding additional IT staff from the outside for the duration of the project.

• Workload growth on ongoing or multiple projects:
  IT Staff Augmentation will be beneficial for businesses looking to increase labor to handle the increased volume and unexpected spikes in workload. Your team's progress can be halted by an abrupt rise in customer demand, seasonal changes, an increase in orders, and other unforeseen price increases. It might result in a backlog, delays, and missed deadlines, which could lead to penalties and reputational harm. A flexible workforce can easily help offset this.

• Internal staff is overly preoccupied with another project:
  Your internal team is way too busy. It is not possible to divert them or have them work on two important, high-profile projects at once. IT staff augmentation enables you to hire employees solely for that one-time, exceptional, high-paying project that you can't afford to lose and let them go once the project has been handed off. A project-specific augmentation with no conditions attached increases revenue with an additional project and wins over a client.

• Having trouble hiring despite the availability:
  It can be challenging for employers to even get candidates to show up for interviews. It is more difficult to attract talent because workers are now considering other options like freelancing, rather than because the industry lacks that specific talent. Although there are open positions, there is still a glaring discrepancy between the priorities of the applicants and what the employers have to offer. According to Paychex Jobs Index, hiring is a challenge for small businesses.

Augmentations: Solutions & Challenges

• Finding the ideal specialist:
  To ensure that your project is successful, you must identify the right talent. By 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled due to a lack of qualified candidates, according to a Korn Ferry report. With qualified, competent, and experienced veterans who bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise, you cannot cut corners. Often organizations struggle to hire the right candidate who would be the perfect technological and cultural fit for the project.

  Solution: Collaborate with a reputable and trustworthy staff augmentation business. Choose a partner that possesses the best security standards and certifications, such as ISO, PCI DSS, and HIPAA, and that offers a diverse set of skills, a large talent pool, a strong technological background, and extensive exposure to various business types and verticals. Take the following actions as well:

  • Review their onboarding procedure and collaboration best practices. Gain an understanding of their training, project methodologies, management, and availability.
  • Conduct an introductory call to discuss their business model.
  • Examine the references, testimonials, portfolio, and reviews. Review the case studies and success tales of the business.
  • Evaluate the candidate on their communication, development, security, teamwork, and other metrics.

• Administration and communication:
  The last thing you want is to partner with a candidate who lacks the necessary interpersonal and teamwork skills. A distant member who ignores messages and cancels meetings can cause problems. Businesses can't take the chance of experimenting with a resource that falters or stumbles when confronted with stand-up scrums, emails, chats, and project tracking tools.

  Solution: Avoid areas where team dynamics cannot be incorporated as a solution. A closely knit team requires a resource who is accessible and easy to work with during business hours. a candidate who maintains open lines of communication to accept direction and voice concerns. The best results for your project will come from following the best coding practices, acting maturely, and building relationships with your team. In addition, bear the following in mind:

  • The candidate is ready to fit into the team's schedule and working culture.
  • The candidate is knowledgeable about various project management service methodologies, such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps.
  • The candidate works in a secure environment with the necessary tools and technology.
  • The candidate exhibits flexibility and understands critical time-sensitive deadlines.
  • The candidate respects coworkers.

• Knowledge Transfer:
  A team's workspace can become chaotic due to inconsistent and erratic knowledge transfer. Peers will struggle to work creatively if they can't adopt best practices for delegating tasks and conveying instructions. Kick-off, implementation, and closure are a few stages that call for a different instructional approach from the beginning. When the informal knowledge transfer pace or quality deteriorates at some point, projects go awry, resulting in missed deadlines and quality problems.

  Solution: Through end-to-end visibility, granular transparency, user-friendly collaboration, and a strong communication charter, you must invest in tools and resources that break down silos and simplify and streamline knowledge sharing, learning, and efficiency. Teams that have grown and become well-organized have a good plan for gathering project information. They are skilled at organizing the process, assigning tasks, and monitoring the outcome. Here are some additional considerations:

  • Get the appropriate information assets together, such as spec sheets, videos, test documents, guidelines, etc.
  • Establish a methodical, planned, and milestone-based roadmap.
  • Choose the appropriate knowledge transfer tools
  • Choose a knowledgeable person to relay the information.
  • Create the agenda for the meeting and send the minutes (MoM)
  • To discuss and reinforce information, hold meetings and Q&A sessions with stakeholders.
  • Track and measure ongoing work to stay on top of trends.

• Scalability & Flexibility:
  Let's say your project requires more developers than were originally requested. Does the partner have a sizable pool to meet your needs in that case? Associating with vendors who use freelancers or lack expertise can be detrimental to your project. Long recruitment processes can cause time-to-market and project completion delays. The longer hiring wait times occur when high-end tech specialists in AI/ML and other fields are needed.

  Solution: Any flexible staff augmentation company must be able to mobilize and offer more IT specialists at the last minute. The vendor must agree and carry out your requests as soon as possible if you want to scale the team. Only invest in companies that have a sizeable pool of versatile talent that is accessible round-the-clock. When a developer leaves or you need more developers to meet nearly impossible deadlines, you can rely on having a shelf stock of extras. Additional cues to watch out for include the following:

  • In order to avoid partnering with businesses that rapidly lose employees, check the attrition rate and determine the overall strength and total active personnel in the required role.
  • Determine their hiring process and the typical time it takes to deploy a candidate.
  • Identify the number of screening/review rounds and assessment procedures.
  • Check the employee Net Promoter Score, work index, culture rating, and overall branding.
  • Talk about the various methods your partner employs to discover and ingest talent. Learn about the company's efforts to promote diversity and retain employees.

• Legal, Investment, and Returns:
  Verify that the contracts in place exactly reflect your requirements. Contractual disputes are a common occurrence for businesses, which causes delays. They didn't thoroughly examine each situation, which is why. These businesses find it difficult to negotiate their issues in the middle. Their failure to adhere to the terms puts your project in danger or ultimately causes delays.

  Solution: Prior to working with a staff augmentation company, clarify the contract, explore your options, and put together a contract that gives you adequate control over the quality, difficulties, and security. A watertight or leakproof contract addresses all exceptional circumstances and excludes any room for disagreement. Check the clauses to see if you receive significant returns on your investment. Here are a few more things to keep an eye out for:

  • Establish liability clauses that define limits of responsibility.
  • Introduce penalties for non-compliance with the contractual terms.
  • Establish guidelines for safe-proof measures/warranties in case of disruptions and delays.
  • Analyze the risk to reward for the investment with the staff augmentation company. Understand the breakup of your investment for the perceived value.
  • Specify the conditions under which invoices will be issued and paid.

To Conclude With

The right talent must be obtained, but what else is essential? To improve the team's ability to complete projects on time, the solution is to adhere to a hiring policy that fits your budget. Businesses can now work with staff augmentation companies instead of wasting crucial time and risking negative client feedback. enabling them to improve, speed up, and level up their internal processes for a quicker completion—all without going over budget and while maintaining flexibility.

By hiring specialised professionals for specific projects, modern businesses can gain that competitive edge without sacrificing quality or putting too much strain on their resources (time and money). Contact Buildnetic if a development project in your company requires additional assistance.