The creative industry has broken through the $100 billion barrier – and that was only in the UK. Here in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the whole IT workforce will exceed 1.2 million by 2026.
To reach the heights of digital experiences while maintaining company continuity, brands and retailers should be able to scale their software engineering workforce depending on the size and length of projects.
And with the size of the global market’s outsourcing development services is estimated to be $85.6 billion, the most popular engagement model is staff augmentation. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, between ½ and ⅔ of companies are expected to use outsourcing services.
Staff augmentation is a typical development outsourcing model that enables rapid scaling to meet project needs.
Yet the issue is that there are many companies don’t don’t quite know how to get the most out of staff augmentation. So here are some suggestions to keep in mind!
Fostering flexibility
Augmented staff are easier to integrate into a company when flexibility is encouraged. Said another way, holding strict control over rigid development processes doesn’t tend to lead to the right cocktail for success.
Dev methodologies such as Agile allow teams to work with greater flexibility. And this is backed up by research that suggests Agile projects are 28% more successful than traditional waterfall projects.
And fortunately, augmented staff bring with them the experience and expertise of previous working conditions and best practices in workflow management.
Clear communication
Perhaps the biggest challenge for any company is how to foster clear communication between the workforce. In fact, 86% of employees say that the lack of cooperation and ineffective communication was the number one cause of workplace failures.
Whether it’s a private relationship or a workforce, the benefits of communication are obvious. When staff augmentation is utilized, fostering clarity over the scaling strategy is vital. What you want to achieve. What the limitations are. What the corporate culture is like, and so on and so on.
To stimulate the conversation and lessen the friction to communication, productivity and collaborative tools like Slack, Teams, and Trello, are used by companies that operate remote teams.
Define the roles and work processes
To ensure that a project’s commitments are met, define each role of the augmented team. This provides developers with a platform for sharing ideas as well as feedback. A documented workflow makes sure that external staff can slip into the team and hit the ground running.
Double down on documentation
Documentation-driven development lies at the core of any working software – which requires consistent updating. So to mirror that, ensure that augmented staff keep and maintain records of their code at every stage of development – using the platform of choice, whether that be BitBucket, GitLab, Github, etc.
The outsourcing manager should ensure that both the augmented staff and in-house staff work to the same standards and keep code readable. This will also ensure that if you decide to change your augmented staff, or for new members to be kept up to speed with a project, it should be a simple process of them plugging into the platform and continuing on with the code.
PS: ArganoStudios is one of the world’s leading digital product & experience dev shops. Contact us to see how we can work together.
