Team augmentation service

Free time

The most valuable resource is time. Heads of IT departments of large corporations are especially careful about their own labor costs, therefore, they are increasingly attracting external resources to solve current IT problems. Through the involvement of a team of third-party developers, the lion's share of the client's time is freed up for strategic planning and focus on truly important business tasks. Operations, micromanagement, project management, personnel changes – all this becomes the responsibility of the development partner.

Team augmentation also frees up the resources of the customer's HR department. Issues related to recruitment, adaptation, onboarding of new specialists, motivation are on the side of the external development team. 

The client receives a ready-made cohesive project team with relevant experience. If you can build a relationship with a permanent IT partner, then there is no need to train new teams in the same way with the same set of rules, standards and technologies. A permanent contractor does not need to be dedicated to the specifics of the business. He is already familiar with the accepted framework for conducting design work, the necessary communicators and task trackers are set up. 

Specialists of such an outsourcing team are always ready to be included in the project on demand and provide a quick result. It also greatly simplifies the solution of bureaucratic issues related to paperwork, contracting and NDA. The ability to focus resources on what is important is the main and most valuable benefit that team augmentation provides.
Project launch and implementation speed

In a highly competitive environment, such a parameter as the speed of a new product release is critical for companies. Practice shows that the leaders of the digital race are those companies that use team augmentation. Trends in the IT industry are changing with space speed, the need for new competencies of specialists often appears suddenly. 

Given the shortage of qualified IT specialists, most businesses have a partner in their arsenal who is ready to promptly provide a specialist or an entire project team with the necessary competencies in order to, despite the lack of internal resources, release the product within the strictly planned deadline of the company. Moreover, attracting external resources often allows you to reduce time-to-market.

If a business needs an urgent project scaling, team augmentation becomes an indispensable resource. External teams, by the nature of the specifics of their activities, are “sharpened” for quick adaptation both to the project itself and to possible changes in the course of implementation. Therefore, the involvement of a reliable outsourcing partner is guaranteed to ensure a high speed of inclusion of external specialists in the current project.

Budget Savings

Companies that successfully use the team augmentation model report up to 25% reduction in overall organization costs. The numbers could be even more impressive. The services of external specialists are always more profitable if you need to perform a separate block of work within the project, for example, testing new product features or upgrading an existing version of an application.If we are talking about episodic work – project work, say, like creating and launching an MVP, then using an external resource will also be cheaper.

Thanks to team augmentation, the need for capital expenditures (CAPEX) disappears – all the necessary investments have already been made by the partner. The released funds can be invested in other areas of the business or used for operating expenses (OPEX).

The possibility of operational changes in the project, for example, software disaster recovery, also works to save money. Since in-house development no longer needs constant funding, the cost of operations is significantly reduced. If during the project there is a need to stop the project, the customer simply informs the outsourcing company about it. The issues of distribution of released resources and payment of wages for the period of “idle” of specialists remain on the side of the outsource developer. When the situation on the market or within the company changes, the customer calmly resumes work with the outsourcing team and spends funds only on actual development.

Flexibility

Tasks on the customer's side can be varied. The competencies of internal specialists in some cases may not be enough to implement some of them. The advantages of attracting outsourcing companies lies in their flexibility and ability to form any project teams for a variety of requirements and project tasks of the client.

If the in-house developer, over time, at some point ceases to suit the employer, then interaction with him in the future will create additional difficulties. In the case of an outsourcing company, the external team takes on the risks associated with replacing a specialist. The task of the external team is to provide such resources that will ensure a quality result and make working on the project as comfortable as possible.

Transparency

The basis of a productive relationship between a client and a contractor is the formation of an open partnership dialogue between them. The main role in establishing such relationships should be assigned to the outsourcing company. There are many ways to organize a comfortable workspace: task trackers displaying the current status of tasks, weekly meetups with discussion of intermediate results, working out sprints and receiving feedback from the customer. Regular communication in messengers also allows the customer to get as close as possible to the development process and always stay in the center of events. A properly planned project workflow gives the customer full control over the development without investing in the team and project management – this is another plus in the general treasury of the benefits of working with an outsourcing partner.

Confidence

The growth in demand for external IT development services naturally provoked an increase in competition among specialized teams. Obviously, the main value of an outsourcing company is its specialists. Therefore, today contractors pay special attention to the selection of employees in their own teams. As a rule, companies have a multi-stage algorithm for selecting candidates in order to offer the customer highly competent specialists, strictly with proven experience in complex projects. 

The entire personnel reserve of the company, as a rule, takes regular refresher courses, and also builds up expertise on the company's internal projects. The developer's management closely monitors the staff retention rate in the company, develops employee motivation and incentive systems in order to ultimately provide the customer with confidence both in the constancy of the project team staff and in the final result.

A good practice is pre-project training of the customer's "inner kitchen" specialists before being included in the project. This approach allows the customer not to pay for the adaptation time of a new outsourcing specialist. The client receives a completely ready-to-work frame, which already in the first hours of work on the project begins to solve problems.

Quality

Obviously, for the qualitative implementation of the project, it is necessary to attract specialists with high expertise, which has been growing over the years. It is not always profitable for a business to invest time and finances in developing the competencies of internal specialists. There are two main reasons: the work is irregular or urgent.Hiring an expensive expert on staff for project employment is not a viable solution. The selection of a specialist for an urgent task seems impossible at all, because just finding a worthy candidate will take several weeks, not to mention additional time for adaptation.

Another situation: an in-house team, it would seem, with sufficient competence, but at the same time with regular tasks of the same type and “blurred eyes”. The solution to the issue in all of these cases lies on the surface - contact an outsourcing company and get professional advice on the issue of interest or the necessary IT service.

Many companies have already realized that the expertise of outsourcing teams is always deeper than in-house, as they specialize in their field, work on different projects and serve many customers in various industries with diverse tasks. Sometimes the involvement of outsourcing contractors can even solve the issue of introducing innovative solutions and modern technologies into the customer's infrastructure.
Thus, team augmentation is one of the most effective tools for optimizing a company's business processes. With the right building of partnerships, an external team can become not just “insurance” or “spare hands” for the implementation of current tasks, but a strategic asset for productive business development. Many companies even manage to maintain a leading position in their segment precisely due to the competent distribution of operational tasks. 

Companies practicing team augmentation are already convinced that interaction with reliable external developers opens up interesting opportunities for business: reducing time and financial costs for operational issues and project management, easy and fast scaling of teams, acquiring the best market expertise, removing risks associated with personnel permutations. Senior management can be confident in a quality result and easily switch from production tasks to strategic issues aimed at business development. The IT services market today is quite mature, so the customer only needs to decide on the right specialists for team augmentation.