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If your company depends on an e-commerce portal or cloud-based tools, you will naturally have some in-house IT talent. But, will you have people trained for whatever design, development, and testing work your mission-critical tools may need?

Not every company can even consider having a fully staffed IT department anyway. This is exactly why so many freelancers and temp firms are out there. They know your company or one like it will need to beef up their talent pool, at least temporarily, to tackle a development project. Staff augmentation is another alternative; One that has a software development firm hire out programmers when a client needs them. These services offer several benefits, benefits that may be absent in other approaches to meeting your software development needs.

Options for Filling IT Needs

If you need help pulling off a big development project, outsourcing is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Find a company that does custom software development and let them do the work. Or, hire a couple of programmers to supplement your own programmers. Staff augmentation is a good alternative to bringing on a temporary worker or outsourcing all of your development and testing work. There is another alternative though – using a third party to provide the talent you need when you need them. That type of outsourcing is what we sometimes call staff augmentation.

Any company doing software development work has probably encountered a situation where staff augmentation was a better option than hiring. The rest of them will likely find themselves in that situation. Why? Well, how many companies doing software development have found their own IT staff overwhelmed or in need of specialized expertise just for a few weeks? More than you think.

Sometimes you need to expand your IT department quickly to capitalize on a business opportunity. You may also want to consider staff augmentation over contracting out development work if you have a project manager with the technical know-how it takes to run a mobile app development project, for example.

5 Benefits of Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation offers similar benefits to working with a temp agency or a freelancer but with a couple of advantages. Finding and vetting freelancers will take more time than screening a development firm. As with temp services, you get a high level of flexibility – bring in an expensive technical expert for a few weeks at the right time and your obligation ends there. Staff augmentation offers five potential benefits:

1. Adaptability: Easily adapt to changing business conditions. You probably don’t need the full range of strategy, design, and development skills in-house all of the time. This is the very reason outsourcing exists, to provide companies with the ability to bring on someone with a specific skill set when their services are truly needed. A staffing augmentation firm allows you to easily round out a development team and use those people for only as long as their services are truly needed. In turn, this kind of flexibility saves time and money.

2. Time Saved: Save time on recruiting new employees or vetting freelancers. Consider how much effort it can take to find and hire a freelancer or a temporary staffer. For a coding position, you absolutely need someone around who can evaluate the quality of their work and to be sure they really have the skill level your work calls for. Not only can you reclaim staff time for other work, but you can also reduce the time it takes to go from planning to having a finished software project.

3. Cost savings: You’ll save by having reduced operating expenses because you aren’t paying benefits, providing a workspace, and absorbing the HR costs associated with having in-house developers.

4. Easier human resource management: Staff management can be faster and more efficient because your own project manager or chief technology officer (CTO) can directly oversee technical staff, instead of leaving that to the outsourcing company’s manager. (In other outsourcing models, the staffing firm would assemble a team and manage them on your behalf.)

5. Enhanced data security: This probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of outsourcing your IT work. However, augmenting your staff with a cybersecurity expert is one obvious example of how hiring outside talent can enhance security.

Now you can see how staff augmentation saves time and money. Let’s see how those benefits might add up for a company whose business is to provide information and education via a web-based portal.

Staff Augmentation is a Powerful Development Strategy

Carrying out a complex custom software development project often requires both lots of work and a diverse set of IT skills. Hiring for IT staff augmentation offers a viable solution to meet those needs while potentially saving money, working more efficiently, and getting a better product. If you need to hire outside talent for planning, design, coding, project management, and QA, DevDigital can help. Contact us to learn more about our services.