[Column] Nick Durrant: Businesses need to adapt to new disruptive staffing models

Recruiting and staffing have become more complex, technology driven and many businesses view this disruption as a threat. They need to understand that they cannot continue using traditional methods and keep doing things the same old way. Increased operating costs and lower productivity will certainly mean their demise, unless they change their thinking and start investing in technology.

The sudden availability of an on-demand global workforce has changed the way companies recruit, staffing leaders will have to adapt quickly to the new disruptive models. With the dramatic increase in the use of contingent workers across the globe, staff augmentation has become an incredibly powerful tool in today’s business.

The staffing industry is fast changing and the employment of temporary staff to augment the capacity of businesses is becoming common practice. This is especially true in the software development industry, where software development houses provide clients with two options. They could either provide a team of developers to build an app on their own or provide a team of developers that will augment the client’s team.

Staff augmentation is fast becoming the buzzword in the app development job market, attracting more businesses to hire remotely. However, not many businesses understand the benefits of staff augmentation and the art of choosing the right model to harness global resources.

A model to extend your team

Team augmentation is an outsourcing strategy that is used to staff a project. This model helps extend a team by evaluating the existing staff and then determining which additional skills are required. This normally happens when the client needs help with an existing project.

It’s a flexible outsourcing strategy that enables clients to hire app developers globally and manage your augmented team directly. You are the one to choose from the candidates that fit your requirements and to cut or extend your augmented team whenever you need to.

Clients can now choose from a plethora of candidates that fit their requirements and can extend or reduce their augmented team whenever they choose to do so. They can add skilled technical resources to their in-house app development team, either on a short or long-term basis. The largest benefit is that these resources are provided and employed by the app development company, eliminating the cost and liability of permanent staff.

Managed agile project delivery

There is often a misunderstanding between staff augmentation and managed project delivery services. Whilst staff augmentation is paid for on a time and material basis, a managed project approach concerns a fixed set of deliverables. Augmented staff could be used for writing lines of code for a specific app and they would be paid per hour against the work they complete, giving the client the opportunity to change the backlog of work as they wish. Through managed a manage project, a developer would be hired to develop a specific app with a fixed set of requirements, and would be paid upon completion of the project.

With a managed project delivery service, the app development house could manage the entire project through their project management team. This means clients don’t need to employ any in-house developers or manage a remote development team. With managed services, clients often don’t even know who is working on their project or what the developers are doing and what decisions are being made throughout the process.

Cost efficiency and Flexibility

Clients don’t have to worry about administrative or operational expenses because staff augmentation has an extremely transparent cost structure. They merely pay a fixed fee per resource and the development house takes care of the rest. With team augmentation, clients also gain access to a wide talent pool including UI/UX designers and front-end developers. And it’s much easier to replace resources because the talent pool is bigger.

There is a huge misconception that one can circumvent the cost of paying benefits for a full-time employee by hiring augmented staff instead. This is not true because the staffing provider still needs to pay the benefit costs, which in turn get factored into the rate. In some cases it could be better to employ full-time developers.

Another misperception is that augmented staff actually cost more than their equivalent full-time employees. If one considers the total cost of full-time developers, the financial benefit of contracting with augmented staff is quite reasonable and cost-effective.

Conclusion

Staff augmentation is a powerful model that businesses can use to increase agility and respond to the changing needs of the organisation. It is an outsourcing approach to properly staff a project in accordance with concrete business requirements.

It includes accessing the skills of existing staff, adding new staff and assembling a qualified team to ensure project results and timely delivery. This ultimately results in permanent staff working alongside qualified contractors with specific programming skills.

Staff augmentation helps company’s source new talent much faster than hiring new skills or training existing staff. It is largely in demand due to a highly vigorous market where cost-efficiency and productivity is critical.

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