IT staff augmentation has consistently been an integral aspect of the information technology growth strategies of countless businesses worldwide. It is the ideal outsourcing model, allowing companies to enhance both existing IT teams and current technological capacities in order to meet ever-changing demand, while at the same time significantly reducing expenditure on IT services.
IT Staff Augmentation in a Global Landscape of Remote Collaboration
Following the unprecedented changes experienced in 2020, businesses around the globe have chosen to go remote, in terms of both internal operations and external partnerships. In our current, changing world, the staff augmentation model has proven to be the ideal solution for organizations seeking to overcome internal technical deficiencies by accessing and partnering with global talent to attain profitable software solutions and vital expertise. Offshore collaboration has become more necessary than ever before, as we navigate the “new normal” of the global business landscape. During this world-wide shift to virtual business, staff augmentation is the key component to growth and agility, allowing companies of any industry or location to leverage top-caliber information technology to attain organizational growth objectives, even in this challenging economy.
Top Benefits of the Staff Augmentation Model
Access to Limitless Global Talent and Expertise
As previously mentioned, IT staff augmentation enables your company to connect virtually with proven experts in the field from across the globe. This unique model invites a wealth of technical talent and know-how to become a directly integrated component of your existing IT team. The opportunity to collaborate with the world’s leading IT outsourcing providers leads to optimal quality service and productivity within your organization’s IT functions.
Flexibility
This model provides your business with great levels of flexibility, allowing you to seamlessly supplement or reduce particular IT resources in response to your changing demands and strategies.
Minimized Overhead and Optimized Cost
Because an outsourcing partnership eliminates the effort and cost associated with recruitment, onboarding, office expenses, and employee benefits and perks, utilizing the staff augmentation model ensures a substantial reduction in corporate overhead, resulting in overall cost optimization for your business.
Round-the-Clock IT Operations
Collaboration with an offshore vendor empowers your IT department to achieve an uninterrupted work cycle. By realizing the advantages of time-zone difference, your company can benefit from continuous IT resource availability and valuable 24/7 support.
Best Practices for Managing Offshore IT Resources Efficiently
Based on extensive expertise in the field of IT staff augmentation, as well as a track record of successful collaboration with offshore clients, we share our advice on how to most effectively manage remote team members. The following tips will help you employ this model to drive maximum business value.
Select the Right Offshore Partner
It is important to firstly begin by identifying an experienced and reliable IT staff augmentation service provider with vast industry expertise, a distinguished project portfolio, and demonstrated proficiency in servicing offshore clients operating in industries comparable to your own. Additionally, carefully select a partner who is offering to provide an added value to your company’s IT department instead of just standard service.
Nurture Open and Clear Communication
Effective communication is essential to every productive business relationship – from strategic business partnerships to internal manager-employee relations – and IT project management is certainly no exception. A lack of clear, organized communication with team members is likely to lead to a project’s failure.
There are certain communication challenges that may be encountered in offshore collaboration such as time-zone differences, language barriers, geographical distance, and logistical difficulties. What is the best way to overcome these challenges and turn them into advantages, so that your company can fully benefit from this outsourcing model? Efficient communication is key, and it can easily be accomplished through systemized protocol comprising routine phone calls, online communication via email or messaging tools, and video conference calls. Offshore team members should possess high levels of English language proficiency so as to maintain smooth communications between geographically-dispersed team members. To ensure fluent cooperation in this model, it is imperative that all team members be made explicitly aware at the outset of all requirements and expectations. This can be achieved through transparent, coherent communication on your part.
Define Roles and Workflows and Establish Processes
Defining the roles of both internal and external team members is a vital component of a successful offshore partnership, and critical to making sure that all responsibilities are covered. Furthermore, assigning project managers and team leads to monitor task completion activities will promote overall project success. It is especially helpful to implement development workflows to familiarize each team member with all stages and steps of the project, thus securing consistency and structure.
Adopting reliable project management systems will additionally help your company achieve better results. Using project management tools is an effective way to streamline the work of your team members and track the progress of your projects across each stage of the software development lifecycle.
Blend Offshore Resources with Your Internal Team
The staff augmentation model is at its most effective when your remote and onsite IT resources function as a single development team. As your internal project managers hold responsibility for the timely and appropriate delivery of results, it is critical to eliminate the division between offshore and onsite resources, and to cultivate an environment in which IT personnel are perceived as one unified project team, with members located in varying time zones.
Build Trusting Relations with Offshore Managers
If you require more general changes to be made with regard to your remote IT specialists, communicate these needs with offshore leadership representatives, facilitating mutual understanding as you clearly convey your ideas and vision. Obtaining the support of offshore management teams is fundamental to successful IT staff extension.
Avoid Risks
You need peace of mind that your organization’s data will be completely safe with your vendor. Therefore, make sure that the company with whom you choose to partner has a well-established information security policy that is strictly enforced in all operations.
The Recap
IT staff augmentation is a flexible solution that allows your company to reach its upmost potential in information technology, and helps you to simultaneously scale IT teams, maximize business growth, and implement strategic cost optimization techniques. To leverage this model’s numerous benefits, best practices and appropriate methods must be adopted in identifying, selecting, and managing your offshore IT resources.
Living in a remote work era is yet one more reason to opt for outsourced partnerships. Augmenting staff has proven to be an innovative strategy that can provide immense opportunity for business excellence and rapid development.
For over 13 years, we have been successfully practicing the staff augmentation model in partnership with a large number of offshore clients. If you wish to learn more about how we have achieved success, we invite you to get in touch today.
IT staff augmentation is your opportunity to engage third-party qualified resources in your IT projects and avoid hiring and onboarding full-time employees. Incredible work and research done to let users know how to manage offshore resources in the remote age.
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