5 Staff Augmentation Challenges and The Ways to Solve Them

Staff augmentation is a simple and popular business model to quickly extend your in-house team with remote developers, cutting operational costs, coping with an increased workload, and keeping your project running. However, this tactic is neither a magic pill nor a one-fits-all approach that may also be challenging.

In this article, we will overview the main pitfalls and challenges that are typical of the process of IT staff augmentation so that you can avoid them and drive the ultimate benefit from this development strategy.

1. Finding the Right Talent

Finding the right talent is perhaps the greatest challenge you may face on the way to scaling your team with remote developers. Despite the global hiring opportunity, making the final choice can be difficult, especially if your company lacks recruitment expertise or hire freelance developers. 

Solution

• Provide detailed job requisitions. The more detailed your job requisition is the more chances of finding the perfectly-matched tech talent. Consider your project specifics, the skill set, and the level of development experience, and suggest the winning team structure in advance. 
• Choose the destination wisely. Also, consider the destination you are hiring from since each of the popular IT outsourcing countries can boast of specific tech talent. For example, Ukraine is famous for JS and PHP developers, while Latin America can be a good choice to hire data analysis specialists. So, choose a destination with a perfectly matched talent pool so that not to face the shortage of the necessary programmers locally. 
• Interview the developers on your own. This is another best practice to make sure the suggested candidates match your project specifics. Interview them on your own stage-by-stage, checking hard and soft skills, and ensuring personal fit. Some companies hire a dedicated tech consultant to help them with interviewing. 
• Partner with a trusted tech talent vendor. A credible company with relevant hiring expertise is more likely to source you the perfectly-matched candidates because of their real-life experience and a huge database of potentially suitable programmers. However, getting in touch with a reliable development vendor is both the solution to the problem of finding the right talent and the challenge in one bottle, so let’s review it in more detail in the next section.

2. Partnering with a Trusted Talent Vendor

For companies with no in-house recruiting expertise, hiring an extended team from a development vendor can be the right solution. Such a tactic allows for speeding up the hiring process, accessing top tech talent, and leveraging the onboarding practices of the vendor. However, to get all these benefits, you should choose a talented sourcing partner wisely to avoid hidden costs and possible scams. Here is how. 

Solution

• Ask for a recommendation. Leveraging the power of social proof is one of the best tactics when you have to make an important choice. Consider asking your business partners for a recommendation, but after getting it, proceed with validating the company’s expertise. 
• Research the online reputation of a company. Next, discover the company’s official website and social media profiles, plus read the reviews on Clutch.co and Good firms. Pay attention to such important factors as speed of delivery, project-candidate match, ease of communication, and the costs for the services. 
• Run pilot staff augmentation project. To avoid costly pitfalls and extra investments, consider running a pilot project with your development vendor. So, instead of hiring a full-fledged augmented team, hire two-three developers to find out how the process works, how the vendor will help you with onboarding and 

3. Communication and Collaboration

This is an evergreen challenge remote teams face, and the augmented team isn’t an exception. Even after completing the onboarding stage, collaboration and communication issues may arise. Let’s find out how to avoid this pitfall. 

Solution

• Choose an effective collaboration tool. While most development projects use Jira, this is not the only tool to choose and use. Depending on your project specifics and the personal preferences of both teams, find the collaboration platform that will be the most convenient for them, allowing them to stay productive, get instant notifications and resolve the issues on the go. For example, you can consider Trello, Asana, Monday, Basecamp, and ClickUp. The same goes for choosing the messenger to communicate. While most companies prefer Slack, this is not the only choice, and sometimes not the most convenient one.
• Establish clear communication practices. And don’t forget to discuss them with your talent sourcing vendor in advance. For example, you may define that the response time during working hours shouldn’t exceed 20 minutes, and both teams should attend daily and weekly meetings to share the progress, discuss the mistakes, and learn from them.

4. Forecasting the Upcoming Costs

Forecasting the upcoming costs is another challenge you may face on the way to augmenting your in-house team. Usually, this strategy promises the most value and cost-cutting opportunities when implemented in the short run, and in this case, the upcoming costs are actually easier to forecast. However, there is one more solution as well.

Solution

To get a clear idea of the cost to augment your in-house team, you should choose the IT staff augmentation model before getting started. There are three models to choose from.

• Fixed price. According to the fixed price model, you can hire several tech specialists for the specified team and pay a fixed salary to each of them. This is a good tactic for the projects that are predictable and created according to the Waterfall methodology. 
• Time and material. If you can’t estimate how long you need the help of an augmented team and what workload they can expect, choosing a time and material model makes the most sense. In this case, you will pay for actually received services. 
• Dedicated development team. Usually, a dedicated development team works remotely on a separate project and isn’t connected with an in-house one. However, getting the best from both words is also possible, allowing two teams to communicate and collaborate. Hiring a dedicated development team to augment your in-house one is the most expensive approach.

5. Time Zones Gap

A conveniently overlapping time zone makes the process of communication and collaboration easier. However, those companies facing the need to scale an in-house team for the first time frequently overlook this factor when choosing the destination, and limit the collaboration opportunities for both in-house and extended tech teams. 

Solution

Indeed, the solution to this problem is easier than the ones overviewed above. Consider the time zone difference in advance, when choosing the destination to hire an augmented team. According to this logic, Western Europe startups frequently choose Eastern European countries, and American projects outsource their development process to Latin America. However, there are also cases when the time difference is winning and allows for cutting costs. Hiring from the Far East may be an option to achieve such a goal. 

Conclusion

Augmenting your team is a great tactic to choose for your project development. However, you should be careful when choosing the destination, partnering with a tech vendor, and validating the suggested candidates. 

SpaceBus is a dedicated development and talent soucing company with great tech talent under our roof. Get in touch with us for a free consultation now to discover more winning opportunities for your project development!