The Staffing Evolution: From Outsourcing to Staff Augmentation

Ever since commerce spread into the core of our culture, many if not most businesses have adhered to the goal of holding up quality while driving down costs.

One of the more modern solutions to implement such a process, and one that has become increasingly popular in recent years, is staff augmentation. 

Staff augmentation is implemented to outsource certain jobs and specific tasks that are capable of being done at more competitive rates when compared to hiring extra full-time staff members. In this way, the maintenance of quality can be achieved by filling in those gaps in knowledge and expertise. 

The evolution

As the outsourcing industry continues to broaden among industries and deepen among the different sizes of businesses, so too has the industry that provides these services, raising the level of skill and expertise among its workforce – to a point in which large-scale consultancies that provide staff augmentation may specialize in just one technology.

This evolution in quality when it comes to the outsourcing industry has helped to elevate its reputation which for the last couple of decades has been marked by scandals.

And among the entire landscape of outsourcing, one of the largest sectors to view the greatest advancements has been IT staff augmentation.

Understanding the process

The process of staff augmentation begins with consultations to discover the root skills – as well as processes – that are missing in the current organization for a given project or development roadmap. This stage of comparison between competing vendors will eventually be funneled into a few leads, where more in-depth research and conversions can be carried out.

Each company would benefit from having a tailored approach to contribution auditing and codebase, which will let you dive deeper into the specific quality of already existing software and the productivity of software developers.

Beyond the tech

The ideal staff augmentation partner will have handled multiple projects of various sizes and timeframes, specificities, and levels of control – from being responsible for specific tasks to complete project control.

The consultations will consist of taking a look at the staffing infrastructure, in order to target those areas of opportunity to expand capacity.

Growing a business while cutting costs is an oxymoron;  higher quality services will always outpace bottom-dollar deals when it comes to factors such as satisfaction of work plus return on investment. And to achieve this, it often implies migrating from your offshore team and moving closer to home – to nearshore.

Nearshore consultancies are better positioned when it comes to expanding the capacity of a company. Of course, it’s understandable that for companies with little to no experience of staff augmentation, there is space for hesitancy working with (seemingly) outsiders. And so to overcome this, first consider a consultancy that does staff augmentation that is located as close as possible in terms of time zones, culture, levels of infrastructure.

Parts of Latin America, for example Argentina and Brazil, where there is only a couple of hours difference between them and the US’ east coast. And in particular, Argentina has a strong university infrastructure along with being the country in Latin America with the most English speakers. 

These factors lessen the likelihood of headaches appearing and misunderstandings emerging due to a language barrier.

During moments of business growth, constantly keeping a full-time workforce can act as an anchor to profit and labor capabilities. Staff augmentation goes quite a long way to free up a lot of the weight – training new employees, the onboarding process, HR processing, etc. and ultimately, helps businesses to scale fast.