Let’s face it – getting things done is harder than ever before. The project is growing, and if you used to get pulled in two directions, it now feels like you’re getting pulled in ten. When it comes to scaling your tech team, there are several options out there to help take things off your plate: you can hire for yourself or you could choose to outsource.
We’ll save time by not describing the challenges of managing your in-house team cause you must have already weighed all the pros and cons before googling Outstaffing and Outsourcing and ending up at our website. Starting as a service provider over a decade ago, we now focus on outsourcing and practice both. Today we are here to share our experience and opinions on why we prefer a Dedicated team approach more often than Staff Augmentation.
What is staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation is an outsourcing model, where a software company (like us, Kultprosvet) provides engineers to fill a gap in technical expertise in your current team. Staff augmentation is also known as team expansion or outstaffing.
It usually works on a Time & Materials contract basis, meaning the cost of staffing varies depending on project scope and workload. Although it can also be a fixed-price business model with a fixed budget and a well-defined project scope. Depending on your strategy, cooperation may take a couple of months or last up to several years.
Whatever the business model, your staff supplier handles all the administrative tasks, such as sourcing, interviewing and hiring as well as training people and managing all logistics, legal and accounting paperwork.
Think of it as huge retailers do on a holiday rush. You get quick access to a great pool of tech talents and grow your team with no infrastructure investment. When the hustle has ended, you can either terminate or prolong the short-term contacts.
Staff augmentation model works well if you have a solid internal team that can easily assimilate new members. It’s a temporary measure though and does not work well for long-lasting relationships, as well as for institutional knowledge-based projects. If a project requires a deep contextual understanding of the client’s business, employing increased staff (numbers) often means a longer growth period.
Choose staff augmentation, if:
You have a strong internal team with powerful management
You are struggling to find specific expertise to empower your team in your local market
You are ready to manage and communicate with new members of your team on a regular or daily basis
What is a dedicated team?
A dedicated team is an IT outsourcing model where a company provides you with a remote software development team completely dedicated to your product and business goals. Outsourced engineers are thoroughly selected according to your requirements and can be managed from your side.
A dedicated team addresses an obvious limitation of outsourcing – the lack of individual leadership and a sense of unity.
With other IT outsourcing models, you still get a product at a great price, but you can’t be the leader of the team that brings your vision to life. You don’t have much to say about who works on the project and how it should be managed. With a dedicated team, you get the ability to be the leader of your team as well as participate in the hiring process.
The sense of unity that a dedicated team brings is crucial for startups and innovative products, where creativity is a key success factor. It is also the best option for complex software products which require deep understanding and long-lasting engagement, such as Gifted.co.
Anton Trakht,
CEO at Kultprosvet
The only reminder that your team is outsourced is that team members are not in your office. However, with modern work monitoring and communication tools, this ‘remoteness’ hardly becomes noticeable. Especially now, when half the world is working from home and some companies are transitioning to working remotely entirely because of the pandemic and the massive paradigm shift associated with it.
Four reasons to hire a dedicated team
01 Your project is complex and long-term.
A dedicated team will definitely be a better choice than staff augmentation since a fully devoted team will dive deep into understanding your product’s specifics without being distracted by anything else.
02 You want to focus on production without hustling with accounting, employment, payouts, recruitment, HR, and office environment management.
Let’s say, you decided to hire six engineers in Ukraine. You start with the workforce market research to define the local industry range of salaries and people care standards. And while going through searching, screening, interviewing and hiring people you have to arrange the working space with all the strings attached. It’s a whole lot of time and money, demanding at least a senior HR, office manager, accountant and lawyer.
03 You aim to hire people who are a 100% match for your required expertise and share your company’s values.
When it comes to long-term relationships you can assure you get the right people to the team but not the ones who are temporarily available. In the long run, you keep the knowledge base within the team and nurture the company’s culture.
04 You look for the best cost/quality ratio while considering offshore product development
The math is simple: you get the best engineers available on the market plus the support team of recruiters, HR, financial and legal staff for a fixed fee equal to or lower than the salary of one nice recruiter. The budget is fully transparent, the engineering team is fully dedicated to your project.
To sum up, do not hesitate to reach out to us and arrange the meeting. We are managing 14 dedicated teams at the moment this post has been written and some of the teams made it from the first line of code till and after the product became a unicorn.
