How do I know if I need staffing in my company?
“How do I know if I need staffing on my company?” - Every partner we’ve started working with.
At Develative we worked with different companies in very different stages, from startups to big tech companies, and most of them share the same type of difficulties and context.
I’ll list them as a summary and how with staffing you and your company can address them to maximize your team’s productivity.
Needs extra hands to reinforce your in-house development team.
While you have in-house software developers, it is crucial to complement and improve your existing skills when releasing a new product or launching new projects.
It is something usual to have quarter periods where multiple requirements appear and your team needs to take care of them without looking away from the current project that they’re working on.
Let’s take this example, you and your team are working on a new superb feature, the project is in a good state, the requirements are getting done, you’re getting good feedback from your stakeholders and the deadline isn’t something to worry about at this moment. The perfect blend. And something happens, there’re a few bugs that should be fixed ASAP and you need to take care of them in a proactive way.
This is a typical case where staffing can help you, you could add new engineers to the new coolest project to avoid losing traction or assign them to a leader in order to start to fix those new bugs.
Results? Feature released and an empty bugs backlog ;)
Tight deadlines.
Murphy's Law, this is a common case when your team is running at max capacity and deadlines are looming. According to Harvard Business Review, these kinds of situations are really difficult to prevent and they could be caused by multiple factors like:
Communication
Estimations
Requirements pivotal
More
The solution is to add more muscle to start to get things done ASAP.
Drawbacks? Recruitment is a long cycle from job advertisement to onboarding. And if you’re in a rush, probably you don't have that extra time which could be an average of two to three months.
In this case, staff augmentation is the perfect solution that can enable you to meet your deadlines regardless of the duration of the contract. Adding a staffed engineer to your team can help you keep to your timeline and avoid disappointing project stakeholders.
Flexibility.
Last but not least, let's talk about flexibility and what it means. Depending on the context, the season of the year, the quarter, or a special date, you may have more or fewer items in your backlog.
Let's use Black Friday and Cyber Monday as examples, these kinds of dates come with multiple changes, features, and promotions and you and your team should be prepared to address that big amount of work in that specific period of time. Yes, a bit scary.
This benefit applies to the hiring of external localization managers within a short period of time. It becomes easier to upsize or downsize the team depending on the direction of the project.
One of the most significant benefits of staff augmentation is that it allows you to increase and decrease your workforce on demand depending on the direction of the project. Whenever you need more people, you can scale the project up or down. And in a situation where the project volume and demands grow, you would be required to add to the existing team, talent who are skilled and qualified, which is more effective than hiring full-time employees and laying them off when the project ends.
So, what are the conclusions?
Now that we’ve gone over the “whys” of IT staff augmentation, hopefully, you can better understand when your company may need this service.
In brief, staff augmentation is the best solution for organizations to diminish prices, hold essential resources to support business productivity, and solve the problem of attracting qualified specialists. It is especially relevant during a crisis when companies are forced to reduce staff to optimize costs.
Moreover, staff augmentation offers you the flexibility to increase and lower resources according to the current context and business requirements.
Staff augmentation will no doubt enable your company to focus on the core business and stay competitive in the technological innovation race.
About the author
Marcos Ocon
Marcos is the Chief Operating Officer of Develative. He's in charge of several departments and currently manages a team of +50 engineers, SDRs and HR analysts. He enjoys nature, playing golf with friends and competitive Judo.