When ambition exceeds experience, making progress requires reaching beyond your current situation, your current resources, and your current expertise. Sometimes, you can see where you want to go, and even how to get there, but you need a little support to actually walk the required miles.
That’s where IT staff augmentation comes in. It’s that extra effort, that extra expertise that can make the difference between realizing your full potential and having to live only with what is currently possible.
The practical benefits of staff augmentation flow from enhancing your core team so that you can deliver on a project successfully, short- or long-term. It turns your resources into on-the-ground engineering power.
This jolt of expertise and energy can help make the jump to bigger ideas and bigger markets that will fuel sustainable growth.
Understanding the 5 Big Benefits of IT Staff Augmentation
Any time you add an expert to your prototyping, development, testing, or systems management requirements, you expand the potential and output of your own core team. These external engineers should pursue your goals and take responsibility for your product as if they had been a part of your company from launch. They attend team meetings, participate in discussions, and follow the standards and best practices you know work in your environment.
This ability to act as fully-fledged members of your team is what gives the right kind of external experts the ability to leverage your resources. You get fresh experience and industry insight, as well as dedicated professionals and quality results, but it all fits under your banner, and it all gets harnessed toward your business goals.
With that starting point in place, the benefits of staff augmentation are:
- Scaling up at speed
- Accessing industry expertise
- Keeping your core team at their core tasks
- Resource flexibility
- Reducing costs
Staff augmentation benefits your entire enterprise by focusing your available resources at the specific areas that require action, at the precise time when they need attention.
It takes a variety of skill sets to bring a development project to market. Staff augmentation lets your enterprise target those efforts to produce more than what is currently thought possible.
1. Scaling Up at Speed
Recruitment, training, and onboarding are long and costly exercises. It is ultimately far more cost-effective to retain than to attract and educate.
IT staff augmentation cuts through all that. Outsourced professionals are not only experts at the core job at hand, but they’re also experts at hitting the ground running in a new environment. Rather than start from scratch, IT staff augmentation companies provide talent that is ready in weeks, not months.
That means you can start producing at a higher capacity and a higher speed within the timeframe it takes to draw up and agree on a new test management strategy. Whether you’re facing a long-term development and rollout plan or looking for time savings toward the end of a release cycle, being able to expand your team’s power and productivity rapidly can make a significant difference to your product success.
2. Accessing Industry Expertise
There are IT staff augmentation benefits for every stage of the software development life cycle, but the most rewarding are those that increase your knowledge and experience. You can focus your outsourcing discussions on a single domain or technology to boost an area of your own team that may be lacking. Alternatively, you may want to make sure your push into new territory makes all the right connections and meets all the current trends and standards. Finally, you may just want to make sure the engineers joining your team are able to maintain your own high expectations and make a valued contribution to the project.
3. Keeping Your Core Team at Their Core Tasks
Once you see the potential of a new idea or identify a gap in the market it can be tempting to try and twist your existing resources toward pursuing this new solution—but there’s risk involved. Asking developers to moonlight as automation testing experts, for example, or pressing IT staff into development of untried platforms and interoperability leaves them vulnerable to mistakes, burnout, and dissatisfaction.
It is better to value your team for their strengths and to bring in dedicated experts to handle the additional tasks. Your core team got you to the point of expansion through their unique gifts. You need them to keep doing what they’re doing, and they need the support of others’ expertise.
4. Resource Flexibility
You may have an urgent need for engineers on the ground for the next six months… but what happens when you down cycle for the six months follow that? IT staff augmentation lets you expand and contract your team as your business goals dictate. It lets you target your resources when and where they’re needed most, so there’s no excess being tied up in unnecessary headcounts and an unstimulated workforce.
The right outsourcing partner will keep in touch with your enterprise throughout your development cycle, so that you can engage and disengage their direct services without having to repeat yourself through seasonal onboarding and training regimes.
5. Reducing Costs
In addition to allocating your resources more effectively, you can further reduce costs by seeking assistance from experts beyond your shores. Nearshore development centers let you escape the high costs and long wait times associated with pursuing traditional hotspots such as Silicon Valley. Their proximity to the US and shared time zones let you enjoy these resource advantages without having to significantly alter your working schedules or adapt to the linguistic and cultural differences of further-flung alternatives.
You get access to the latest technologies and practices, and you still get to develop a close working relationship with these newly minted members of your core team, it just takes a more effective use of digital communication tools to maximize your connection.
The resulting resource savings and efficient work practices can give you a substantial head-start in pushing your product and potential to the next level.
Staff Augmentation Benefits Your Entire Business
The resources, knowledge, and technological boost your enterprise receives from augmenting its core functions with IT experts can be enough to bring your most prized goals within reach.
Be it know-how, increased capacity, or more efficient practices you’re in need of, IT staff augmentation can take you beyond what you currently feel is possible.
When you partner with BairesDev you expose your team to the experience and professionalism of the Top 1% IT Talent in Latin America. Our engineers have the knowledge to improve the way you work, and the dedication to take responsibility for the quality of your product. Contact our team today and find out how far your ideas can take you.