Choosing Between Staff Augmentation and Managed IT Services.
More companies than ever before are searching for solutions for IT outsourcing. Finding and hiring an in-house IT staff can be time-consuming, challenging, and costly — not to mention inconvenient if you have a fast-growth or limited-time project.
The two primary IT outsourcing models are IT staff augmentation and managed IT services. Both models are strong alternatives to making full-time hires in-house, but the most effective model depends on your project types and scale.
Staff augmentation is used to outsource specific tasks and functions (input). The managed services model outsources the entire problem and solution to a third-party vendor (output). Staff augmentation’s key benefit is the ability to rapidly scale specific functions, while managed services are best for the long-term handling of entire process.
What is the Staff Augmentation Model?
Staff augmentation is the use of outside personnel on a temporary basis to augment the capacity of your organization.
They are not your permanent employees, but they are fully integrated into the internal team. A company, which wants to use this model for its project development, reduces hiring time and many efforts connected with it.
To understand how much this process can be brainstorming, taking your time and making an endurance test, check out a true story about Israel. A company must officially register employees, endure an exhaustive onboarding process, pay taxes and submit to lengthy interviews proceeding if they wish to terminate an employee.
Yes, you were not mistaken, it is quite difficult to dismiss a person in many developed countries. In Europe, there is a common practice that it is required to prove that the employee does not have a sufficient level of qualification and a special commission will decide whether you can do it or not. Just imagine how much headache and time you can spend on this standard bureaucratic system!
Staff augmentation is a great way to meet your needs for a super-specialist with the least time spent, as well as the ability to save costs, which is beneficial from a business prospectiveadvantages in more detail.
Here are some of the pros and cons of IT staff augmentation:
Benefits of IT staff augmentation
Retain Project Control
With IT staff augmentation, you retain project autonomy. That way, you can ensure project completion to your specifications.
The outsourcing company will simply determine your needs and present qualified candidates for the job. Once you agree upon your outsourced team members, they will adapt to your company and follow your direction to carry out your project’s parameters.
Access to a larger talent pool
Another advantage of IT staff augmentation is it helps you access a wide range of talent pools where you can hire resources from across the world. Plus, staff augmentation fills the skill gaps that your internal team lacks.
Hiring across nations boosts the chances of finding qualified candidates. Advanced tactics enable these specialists to complete complex jobs. Experience and extensive market exposure provide them with extensive expertise. Thus, they enhance initiatives and boost profits.
Choose the skills you need most
Targeting talents help you get competent professionals in place quickly and inexpensively, whether you need support with a specific project or your whole firm.
Instead of hiring an individual and expecting them to gain the required knowledge, you’ll be able to cherry-pick the best candidate based on their specific set of skills.
Better control
Having greater control over one’s employees might benefit businesses as it is one of the pros of staff augmentation. They are responsible for the larger staff’s day-to-day operations and ensuring everyone fits in. From start to finish, the firm is in charge of everything.
Operational efficiency
Only the most enjoyable and productive initiatives are allowed your time and attention. As a result, everyone involved will come out and deliver. This effectively bridges the gap between the demand for and supply of professionals with the necessary abilities.
The benefits of staff augmentation, such as the ability to hire on the fly, help balance the needs of both workers and businesses in novel ways.
Increased adaptability & flexibility
Hiring an offshore development team helps you overcome the downside of permanent hiring which limits your company’s capacity to take advantage of the emerging potential. Instead, choose staff augmentation and pick top talent based on hiring needs. These professionals are highly adaptable and seldom require training (since they are experts in their field).
With its inherent adaptability, a staff augmentation is a great option for businesses that often face fluctuations in demand. When a project team encounters problems that are too difficult to handle, they may need to recruit additional help to keep up appearances.
Employing people full-time allows businesses to grow more quickly. The ability to handle projects of varying sizes is made possible by using temporary workers. In addition, this allows you to expand your operations without lowering standards.
Cost-effectiveness
When weighing the pros and cons of IT staff augmentation, consider how your business can avoid long-term costs by hiring expertise for a single assignment. Project-definite recruiting helps you pay for personnel only when needed instead of hiring personnel.
The such skill-specific ability offers an operational framework that enables a domain-centric advantage over competitors while saving the cost of hiring, training, and retaining employees.
Hire an offshore development team with employee augmentation for temporary staff that is ideal for short-term project initiatives. The staff augmentation strategy helps identify the skills and competence your team needs and acquire the right temporary workers for your project at a low cost.
What is the Managed Service Model?
Another effective way to develop your company is through managed services. This is an opportunity to transfer ownership of a task/business process to other hands.
The global difference between staff augmentation and managed services that MS is a part of outsourcing while SA is about out staffing. The client company fully transfers management, monitoring, and control of its resources, delegating responsibilities to another company. If we compare staff augmentation to managed services, the later one is more complex as well. Now you may think that this model is quite risky and it has no significant advantages. This is not entirely true. Let’s read why.
Benefits of Managed Services
Retain Focus on Operations
Since managed IT services provide their own project management processes, the parent company can step back and focus on its services. The IT company will care for technical functions and development, while your staff zones in on other operations.
Save Time Managing IT
If your company hires in-house IT staff, you’ll need to dedicate time to managing IT projects. To properly supervise IT functions and keep everything on schedule, a project manager will likely need a working knowledge of the project itself.
For companies lacking in technical expertise and management resources, managed IT services might be a practical solution, saving both time and money in the long run.
Cost-effective
The major advantage of managed IT services is that it costs far less than doing everything in-house. By relieving in-house staff of so much work, firms that use managed service providers may save costs in various ways.
Lesser staff problems
Free your on-site staff from running regular computer checks and leverage the benefits of managed IT services. With managed services providers, they can get more done during the workday since they keep systems up-to-date with Windows patches, performing routine maintenance like disc defrags and virus scans.
24/7 Availability
Working with a managed service provider offers you consistent support — 24/7, 365 days. Most round-the-clock offers on-call and weekend assistance. Such features often involve an additional fee. Finding the ideal MSP is easier if you opt for one that operates worldwide, across several time zones, and assists at all hours of the day and night.
Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services
Staff augmentation and managed services are two different staffing models. While both are outsourcing strategies, they are very different from each other. Let’s discuss their differences.
In staff augmentation, a company hires experts with relevant skill set through a provider and they work in-house. While in managed services, the project is outsourced to an external team, and specific deliverable is expected from them.
The service provider takes care of administrative aspects for staff augmentation. The hiring company can select the candidates and manage them. In managed services, the hiring company can’t choose the resources or manage them.
The hiring company can control the staff augmented resources and can manage them like their in-house team. But for managed services, the hiring company has no control and cannot access work.
If opting for managed services, you don’t need any resources to manage the outsourced team. They work independently and make all decisions by themselves. With staff augmentation services, you are hiring resources and are solely responsible to manage them.
TechFrolic’s view:
IT Staff Augmentation or Managed Services – What’s Best for You? Both methods save you from spending time and resources needed for recruiting the experts needed to build your products and reach company’s goals.
Every business is different; therefore, each will have a different strategy when finding the right IT outsourcing partner. When confused between staff augmentation and managed services, consider the benefits above and the drawbacks of making an informed decision.
Both sorts of IT outsourcing will help you increase efficiency and reduce the burden on your full-time staff. Also, they save you from incurring additional expenses of hiring and training the staff while staying afloat with your business objectives.
At TechFrolic, we help our business associates achieve their IT goals by engaging with them in the model that best suits their business needs. We have been helping our customers in both models explained above. We have numerous customers globally who have entrusted us by outsourcing all their IT needs while we also have associations where we complemented current IT teams of our clients.
