Staff Augmentation vs. Delivery Teams – What’s the Right Choice?

Whether you’re a local startup or a well-established multinational company, your business’s success or failure often hinge on your ability to keep pace with technological innovation and deliver every single project on time, within budget, and to specification. While you can always hire in-house teams to execute all of your development projects, it can sometimes be tricky and costly, particularly when consumers’ IT needs are constantly changing.

Since outsourcing nowadays is a popular alternative to in-house resources, you can consider working with a reliable outsourcing partner to manage specific tasks and supplement your in-house team’s current capabilities. Today, the two most popular outsourcing models are Staff Augmentation and Delivery Teams. This post gives you a quick understanding of these models with their pros and cons.

What is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation refers to hiring dedicated developers through a third party to enhance your current in-house teams’ overall capabilities for a specific duration. It’s like extending your existing team to fill the gap of specialized skills and meet the extant business objectives. The individuals are hired based on the specific competencies required in the ongoing project. However, this happens only temporarily.

As an example, if you’re working on a WordPress project, you can hire dedicated WordPress developers to work along with your in-house to deliver a cutting-edge website or web application to your clients.

#Pros

• Niche Expertise: You hire only the best niche-experts from around the globe. The personnel you hire have specialized experience in technologies and processes associated with your project.
• Full Control Over Team: As the employer company, you have complete control over every aspect of your project and your remote team. You can even oversee their work to ensure everything is being done right.
• Flexibility and Convenience: Once the project is completed, you can end the partnership and can even revive it anytime in the future. Additionally, you can scale up or down the team size based on your current requirements.

#Cons

• Short-term Solution: Since you focus only on your current urgent needs, the cost may go dramatically higher if you ever have to scale up your project.
• Management Overhead: The increased number of off-site professionals and the need to supervise their work lead to additional executive load.
• Requires Training: No matter how skilled professionals you hire, they will need additional training to understand your company’s internal processes, tools, and other things.

What Are Delivery Teams?

For more demanding projects that require support throughout all stages of the software development life cycle, the staff augmentation model might not be sufficient. In such cases, you can seek help from an autonomous delivery team that typically consists of a seasoned project manager, a bunch of specialized software developers, and quality assurance specialists.

The best thing about this model is that it allows you to conceptualize software and leave the rest to an external team of professionals. The delivery team then completes the project with little or no involvement of the in-house team.

#Pros

• Rapid Response: With a delivery team, you can rapidly respond to customers’ new demands by quickly delivering a custom software module. The external team can start development immediately after you conceptualize the software.
• Less Burden on Management: In this model, you delegate the responsibility of managing projects to the outsourcing company, which eases the burden of in-house executives. Consequently, they can focus on other, more critical aspects of the business.
• Shared Risk: You typically make the final payment after the project’s successful delivery. That means the vendor bears a higher risk for their success.

Cons

• Limited Control: Since most of the things rely on the provider’s expertise, managers have limited control over daily tasks. However, one can resolve this problem through discussion.
• Finding the Right Team: Finding a trustworthy partner to work with can sometimes be challenging. You’ll have to thoroughly research the firm and analyze the quality of its past projects.
• Not Suitable for Small Projects: Outsourcing smaller projects often proves to be less cost-effective under this model. Some companies may refuse to take on small projects or charge a premium for the same. This can limit your options!

Conclusion:

So, which outsourcing model is right for your company – Staff Augmentation or Delivery Teams? Well, it depends on your organizational needs. If you lack a particular skill or want to scale your in-house team quickly, then staff augmentation is the right choice. Otherwise, if you wish to delegate your entire project to a reliable partner with diverse competencies, then go with an autonomous delivery team.