A complete guide to IT team augmentation
In IT and software development, project excellence relies on an increasingly diverse set of skills within ever tighter deadlines. When you run into a skills gap, low productivity, or tight deadlines, what can you do? Enter IT team augmentation.
Talk to Jeroen, our Accounts director, to see if our ready-to-code dev teams are a fit for you.
Team or staff argumentation is a cost-effective approach to buying-in relevant skills and knowledge to increase productivity without the long-term costs and commitment of hiring people in-house. In case you want to know more, here’s our complete guide.
What is IT team augmentation?
IT team augmentation is when companies enhance in-house IT capabilities by bringing in teams of external professionals or specialists on a temporary basis.
It’s used to cover specific skill gaps, meet project requirements, or manage workload fluctuations. The process involves hiring skilled temporary staff, usually entire teams, with expertise in the areas needed.
Augmented professionals integrate into the existing work environment, collaborating with the internal team to achieve project goals.
What is staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation is a business practice where skilled individuals are added to a team, on a temporary basis, to address short-term needs.
Augmentation of staff allows companies to gain timely access to specialized skills, scale their workforce based on project demands, and remain agile in a dynamic business environment.
The terms ‘team augmentation’ and ‘staff augmentation’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences.
Whereas team augmentation refers to entire teams or units, staff augmentation tends to refer to the addition of individual professionals. Team augmentation has a much broader scope. Both involve supplementing internal teams with external resources.
What are the main benefits of team augmentation?
There are many benefits to IT team augmentation. Here are the main ones:
Discover more about the benefits of IT staff augmentation.
When should you use team augmentation services?
Every project and company is different, but here are some common scenarios when companies choose to reach out for team augmentation services:
- There’s a gap in the skill set required for a specific project
- Tight deadlines have created a need to accelerate project timelines
- Productivity needs a boost and temporary skilled professionals can help
- Increased workloads or seasonal demands call for fast yet temporary scalability
- New and emerging technologies have created an internal knowledge gap
- Budget constraints require better resource allocation and control of expenses
The process of IT team augmentation
Team augmentation in IT and software development can be hard to implement successfully. Here are some best practices for getting team and IT staff augmentation right,
- Clearly define communication channels, roles, and project goals to align augmented teams and in-house teams.
- Strategically match the skills of external professionals with your project requirements, minimizing the learning curve for efficient contributions.
- Integrate augmented team members into your existing team structure, encouraging knowledge sharing, and promoting successful collaboration.
- Implement a comprehensive onboarding process, providing necessary information about the organization’s culture and project requirements.
- Provide regular performance monitoring, constructive feedback to promptly address issues, and contribute to continuous improvement.
IT team augmentation from Proshore
IT staff and team augmentation is quick, easy, and cost-effective with Proshore. Here’s how it works in 5 simple steps:
Get a customized plan that addresses your challenges
Jeroen and the team analyse your challenges to come up with a customized plan and proposal based on what you need.
Meet your new team
Your plan covers setting up team roles and tasks. Babish, our CTO, assembles the best team available from our talent pool and shares it with you for approval.
2-month trial period
Test your team’s output during a 60-day trial period. Not happy with someone? We work with you to replace them at no extra cost.
Expand or scale down
Add new talent to your team or scale down based on your goals and roadmap. No recruiting, hiring or HR paperwork.
Study cases of clients who have augmented their teams with ready-to-code dev teams from Proshore
“These developers are good at what they do, and at a competitive price compared with the Netherlands. It’s been a good choice to work with Proshore.”
— Founder
Surebird: Insurance platform that connects multiple vendors with customers fully automatic.
How Proshore helped Surebird take its algorithm-dependant concept to launch – slashing the MVP's time to market down to 3 months!
“Proshore just blew us away with their approach. They were really professional, and they came with a detailed presentation of how they were going to run their team and work with us. And they became partners with us. Not just a vendor.”
— Interviewstream, Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
interviewstream: A leading HR SaaS, simplifying the hiring process for both recruiters and candidates.
How Proshore's dedicated team, with PHP experts, handled the UI improvements and UX enhancements required by interviewstream's product – a feature-rich platform operating since 2002.
“We started out with one ‘extra employee’ via Proshore, and a year and a half later we’ve expanded to a team of four… The people and the teams are really dedicated to being part of the company.”
— CMNTY, CTO
CMNTY: Leading qualitative research SaaS that helps deliver strategic and insightful reports from big data.
How Proshore fitted into CMTY's development needs and helped them scale sustainably along with their data collection platform – from a single developer to a solid development team.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Team augmentation is when you add skilled IT professionals to an existing in-house team, enhancing its capabilities and filling specific skill gaps.
- Outsourcing is when you contract an external service provider to handle specific IT tasks or projects, often beyond your company’s premises.
- Temporary staffing: Bringing in skilled professionals on a short-term basis to address specific project needs or fill temporary skill gaps.
- Contract-to-hire: Initially hiring external professionals on a contractual basis with the option to convert them to full-time employees based on performance and fit.
- Freelance or gig workers: Engaging independent contractors or freelancers for specialized tasks or short-term projects, providing flexibility and scalability.
- Remote team augmentation: Leveraging remote professionals or teams to access global talent pools and address resource shortages without geographical constraints.
- Project-based augmentation: Hiring experts for the duration of a specific project, allows organizations to assemble specialized teams tailored to project requirements.
- Skill-specific augmentation: Bringing in professionals with specific skills or expertise that the existing team lacks, enhances overall project capabilities.
- Onshore, nearshore, and offshore augmentation: Choosing resources from locations that offer cost-effectiveness (offshore), proximity (nearshore), or alignment with local business practices (onshore).
- Communication barriers can arise when team members are geographically dispersed and may lead to misunderstandings.
- Integrating augmented team members into the existing company culture and workflows can impact collaboration and cohesion.
- Reliance on external resources can reduce in-house expertise and lead to less understanding of the organization’s long-term goals and values.
- Sharing sensitive information with external team members raises security concerns that need to be addressed and managed.
- Ensuring consistent quality of work across the team takes effective monitoring and management practices to meet project standards.
Over a 15 mins call, discover how you can benefit from our services.