What the Heck is Staff Augmentation?

IT Staff Augmentation is a flexible outsourcing strategy that enables you to hire contracted tech talent to help your team get a software product to market faster or push past a major development milestone. 

From smaller dev shops to larger, enterprise-level dev shops, some teams need all hands on deck, with MORE hands—or hands that are exclusively skilled in a specific technology or language to help supplement or manage a team. 

Vendors who specialize in IT Staff Augmentation can help supplement your team on short- or long-term projects, no matter the project scope or size.  

Typically these resources are employed full time by the vendor, thus keeping costs and liability of the contracted talent on the lower end. Devs or consultants contracted out can work remotely or within the brick and mortar of the dev shop needing the resources.

The Bennies of Staff Augmentation

There are several benefits to exploring staff augmentation for a dev team, the big one being allowing businesses to scale with project load and company growth. Here are other operational perks of supplementing your dev talent through staff augmentation. 

• No long-term commitment
• Sustained control and management
• Ability to hire on-the-go
• Access to larger talent pool and new, contemporary opinions
• Cost-effective competitive edge
• Decreases liability and costs of having add’l in-house FTEs
• Operational efficiency

Essentially, companies who utilize staff augmentation services get all the benefits of a full-time employee, without all the HR strings (e.g. benefits, liability, overhead, welcome lunches, etc.).

Augment To Be

Staff augmentation isn’t limited to just developers or software engineers. Custom dev shops have been known to supplement full teams, including project managers, QA associates, development consultants and analysts. 

Companies can contract developers well-versed in technologies like Xamarin, React-Native or Ionic. Or maybe they need a small army of devs skilled solely in JavaScript; either way, staff augmentation makes it possible to fill any voids in dev teams to help get that project finished and launched. Additionally, if they have a project that has gone off the rails and needs a consultant or project manager to get it back on track, staff augmentation is available with a tech life preserver.

The Shift3 Staff Augmentation Process

At Shift3, we deploy highly skilled developers, analysts and project managers individually and in teams to meet the needs of our clients. We have built and augmented short and long-term teams for client’s ranging from local businesses to Fortune 500 firms.

We can help supplement teams of all sizes in these three easy-breezy steps:

1. Tell us about your project and your needs. 
2. We’ll send you our developer candidates (resumes) who meet those technical requirements.
3. We’ll discuss terms and conditions and BOOM, your team just grew to help you hit your internal milestones and complete your project.

All of our developers are experienced and fully vetted before being presented to a client for project work.

Our Talented Team of Rockstars and Dragon Slayers

As you can see from this infographic, our talent pool is about 80-feet deep. Shift3 is a full-stack SaaS firm, so we have our hands in every possible technical language you can imagine.

Solutions That Fit Your Business Model

According to Forbes, businesses are searching for technology solutions that will cater to their company size and their specific needs to help them keep up with challenging circumstances presented in custom development. Forbes sums it up perfectly:

“The company you choose to work with should be reliable and should facilitate top-talented professionals, while ideally sharing cultural similarities and your same time zone. This will allow for a more fluent partner-client feedback cycle. The partner should be customer-centric and willing to go the extra mile to fulfill your main objective: boosting your company’s performance and adding value to your line of work.”

Ultimately, that’s what Shift3 strives to do with our Staff Augmentation services. We become mission-aligned to help your company perform more efficiently to add value in all that you do for your clients. Our team becomes your team. And in today’s environment of working remotely, it’s never been easier with the tools available to connect.

Need an Extra Hand or 10? We Have You covered.

Shift3 specializes in custom software solutions that help businesses scale and solve unique pain points. Sometimes those pain points involve the need for additional development resources on your team. We’ll help you get that product to market faster.

Check out our recent case study to learn more about the staff augmentation project we took on with Betterworks, a SaaS company that specializes in HR software in California’s Bay Area.

Have any questions or need a consultation for an upcoming project? Give us a call at 559 560 3300 or email us at [email protected].

This post was written by Celeste A. Barron, Content Development Manager. You can find her watching Hamilton or performing the choreography to Hamilton while preparing dinner or walking her dog.