If you’re considering staff augmentation to get extra help, don’t listen to the rumor mill. Staff augmentation isn’t the same as outsourcing IT assistance. Staff augmentation adds an expert to your team when you’re working with a new technology or product, and you can’t provide all the training and support your employees need to succeed.
Although some people may have put outsourcing in their burn book due to negative connotations or bad experiences, staff augmentation shouldn’t get thrown on the chopping block too. When it comes to tech services and website support, temporary help that is hired for a specific service is a great option. We like to describe it as supplementing your team with awesome and trustworthy people. Sounds pretty good, right?
There are times when staff augmentation is undeniably the best option for your company. You can get the extra help you need without stretching the budget or committing to a long-term project with an extra employee or team. We’re here to bust the myths and misconceptions you may have about staff augmentation.
"It’s a waste of money."
Say you spend a decent amount of your annual budget on building a new product or a way to engage your customers. If you hire a company to do that work and they don’t provide support or on-boarding for your staff, how are you going to continue to use it to help your business? Staff augmentation should be an important consideration when you take on a new project outside the scope of your usual business model or if you’re planning to upgrade your technology. If you don’t think you’ll need full-time and long-term support, a short term contract is the way to go.
"It’s a waste of time."
If anything, taking the time to onboard your staff with outside help will actually save you time in the long run. Staff augmentation services mean that an expert is there to answer questions and help solve problems, and this doesn’t come with the price tag of a full-time engineer. This way, your higher ups can focus on continuing to move the company forward while your team has the help they need to hold down the fort.
"I’ll only get help with one thing and then get stranded."
Not all staff augmentation is designed to help your team accomplish only one task. Look for someone who is willing to provide support services in addition to staff augmentation. The right provider will want to make sure their short-term training leads to long-term results for their clients. Check out our CTO’s post on how we help clients determine if staff augmentation is the right fit, and how we tackle these projects.
"Virtual support isn’t effective."
Although we believe in working with local companies, you shouldn’t limit yourself to defining helpfulness by physical distance. We all know that technology certainly doesn’t do that.
It is incredibly helpful to have in-person training sessions, but the right company will find ways to work around this. For example, all of our successful staff augmentations utilize Slack so that all the pertinent players are connected at all times and feedback loops are shortened. From training videos and interactive manuals to video calls, we’ll find a way to be there for you. (Sorry if you have the Friendstheme stuck in your head now).
"It only sounds good in theory."
Here’s an example of how staff augmentation has allowed us to help one of our clients.
“One of our clients hired us after a botched launch with another firm. The site was suffering from frequent outages due to performance issues, as well as a myriad of serious bugs. There were two major issues: the site was going down and the international site’s navigation was scrambled.
Our first priority was to stabilize the site. I created a working solution for their navigation that required them to rebuild some of the menus on a test site. While they worked on that, we profiled and fixed the major performance issues. This allowed us to fix both major problems in a matter of days.
Open, real-time communications with their staff are what made the quick rescue a success. Their ability to virtually poke us on the shoulder when the site went down helped us to quickly establish some of the more esoteric causes of the outages. Our ability to guide them through the navigation rebuild and quickly answer questions helped them knock out these issues more effectively.” - Nick Lewis, Sr. Web Architect
Don’t limit your options. A staff augmentation may be the perfect fit for your organization's needs. The experts can be there when you need them to be, for as long as you need them. Open communication throughout the entire project will ensure that everyone is successful. Your team will also learn more about how to integrate new solutions and knowledge in order to manage everything internally for the long-term.