You’re constantly looking for software engineers and once you think you've filled a gap, some new need arises? Well, dealing with the shortage of tech talent in general or particular skills is one of the biggest challenges businesses face at the moment. This is when team augmentation proves useful.
According to the world’s largest IT leadership survey – Harvey Nash Group’s Digital Leadership Report 2021 – 67% of IT executives reported a tech skills shortage. As a result, 46% of tech organizations expand globally to scout for new talent (2020 State of Global Expansion report).
One of the most effective strategies to deal with temporary team capacity problems is team augmentation, also known as staff augmentation and team extension. Over a decade of experience in custom software development gave us a good understanding of the commonly used industry best practices and gave us a chance to develop our own approach to effective collaboration with client teams. In this article, we’re showing how we made team augmentation work for our clients and us.
Team augmentation in software development
Team augmentation refers to using outside staff to augment the capacity of your organization. It’s a flexible model of scaling a team and may involve one or multiple external experts joining a project on a temporary basis. Due to talent shortage, costly and long hiring process, changing customer needs, and new business challenges, it’s become very popular in the IT industry.
Team augmentation comes with a number of benefits:
- Provides easier access to vetted talent and specialized skills, which is especially important in software development.
- Is faster and more cost-effective than hiring, thanks to lower operational costs and fewer legal hassles.
- Gives entrepreneurs and managers time and mental focus to focus on growing their core business.
- Streamlines up- and downscaling. Agility and increased speed to market that businesses gain from team augmentation generate an important competitive advantage.
In order to secure those benefits, it’s crucial to find a partner that shares similar values, such as certain hiring standards, company culture, knowledge sharing, or fostering employee satisfaction. One more important constituent of effective collaboration between a client and their software provider is trust. Having a partner you can trust gives you space to focus on your work and the team to do their best work.
In our 20+ years of experience, we found that trust and shared work ethics are the foundation of effective software team augmentation.
Team augmentation the iRonin way
In our opinion and experience, there is one more key ingredient of efficient team augmentation – prioritizing team-business matchmaking. That’s why, apart from focusing on the industry standards, such as providing a solid vetting process, having the best tools in place, ensuring clear communication, etc., we built our processes and structured the service around the art of matchmaking:
1. Finding the best software team fitted to the technological and cultural requirements of a particular client, not some generalizations or assumptions.
2. Matching our software developers with organizations and projects with a culture fit that will best leverage their potential.
Over the years we have been adjusting the way we gather information from our clients so that we have a full picture of the assignment without wasting their time. Apart from specifying the tech stack, we collect information about the project length, industry, company culture, requirements regarding developers’ independence and communication style, and more.
Our business and technical teams collaborate with talent management, to find developers best suited to those needs. For example, when our client is looking for one engineer, we make sure we suggest people who can and like to work independently – both in terms of work style and the necessary knowledge. On the other hand, when we’re asked to create a team, we’re looking for people with skills and character traits that complement each other and work well together. That way we are able to cover all the project requirements while ensuring smooth collaboration and high productivity.
No matter the team size or tech requirements, through engaging the talent management team in the matchmaking process, we ensure a culture fit between the client and our candidates – a must-have for effective collaboration and satisfaction on both sides.
Having a big and diverse software development team makes it possible for us to cover most of our clients’ needs with the people we already know. However, sometimes it’s not enough. In that case, our HR reps seek external candidates using our network and recruitment know-how. We take into consideration the same factors as with our internal team, but we supplement them with a practical verification of their technical skills and an evaluation of their work ethics, soft skills, and motivation.
We usually provide our clients with a few candidates to choose from, however, in some cases, we can easily find the best person that outruns other options, or with the requirements being very specific, we may be able to find one person with a perfect mix of all the characteristics.
Extend your team with staff augmentation
We hope it gives you a good understanding of our secret sauce for team augmentation. Over the years, we’ve learned that finding the right people, both in the case of traditional recruitment and outsourcing, is key for effective, timely, and good-quality software development.
If you're looking to learn more about iRonin’s team augmentation services, let’s get in touch and see what we can do for you.
