Staff Augmentation vs. Outsourcing

Staff Augmentation Facts

Staff augmentation is an outsourcing strategy that allows a company to add staff to their available teams based on the additional skills required to attend a specific project. It is effective when you need to fill a few gaps within your existing team because it allows you to increase team capacity, avoid recruitment, and reduce operational costs by getting the right people for the challenge.

By offering highly skilled staff augmentation, we provide profiles that require advanced skills that are only attainable via significant training and experience. This is a way to boost productivity since each staff member is assigned a specific responsibility.

Outsourcing Facts

Outsourcing is a business practice in which a company hires a third party to perform tasks, handle operations, or provide services for the company. It is useful when your company doesn't have the capabilities to provide the services or perform specific tasks at the moment and also when the cost to build these capabilities properly takes a lot of time and/or money. 

It is common for companies whose main activities are not related to technology to outsource technological services to satisfy their digital needs.

Several factors must be considered before deciding on the best product delivery model. Optimizing project time and costs and tapping into the knowledge base of a skilled IT partner to complement your in-house team will help you achieve your desired business goals.

If you have never designed/built/maintained a digital product/service, you have to make the decision if you want to invest time and money in developing these capabilities to do that in the long term or shift the responsibility to a third party that must be a key partner. If the answer is to shift the responsibility to a third party, your best alternative is outsourcing. If you want to build your own team in the long term, you have two alternatives:

1. Identify which people in your organization could take some of the required positions and use staff augmentation for the rest of them
2. Outsourcing the first version of your project and working with the third party to understand the activities and profiles you need to build a team for the future.
   
   Finally, it is important to keep in mind that sometimes you can find a hybrid scenario where you will need a position for a long time, which implies people in this position will turn over, and the hiring of these profiles is not your specialty. You can look for a hybrid service hiring professionals as a service for a long-term contract.
   
   After reading this article, if you are interested in any of these services, please contact us!