As you grow your business, finding the right approach to building out your tech team can be challenging. Dedicated teams, staff augmentation, and extended teams are three common options, each with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. In this blog post, we’ll explore the differences between these three approaches, weigh their pros and cons, and provide insights to help you decide which one is the best fit for your unique business needs.
What does a Dedicated Team mean, and how does it function?
When a software development company needs to build a team to work on bulk projects, the recruitment and training process might be time-consuming and expensive. So, companies use this IT outsourcing strategy to hire a team of experts dedicated to the projects.
A provider company hires and trains experts in different fields. When you contact the provider company, they brief the team about your product or business goals and assign the team to you. The team will then focus on the development process while you supervise it.
Benefits of a Dedicated Team
Hiring a dedicated team has certain advantages. Check them out.
- The hassle of hiring and training a team of professionals is gone with this method. You just get what you need.
- Large projects need good team coordination and collaboration, which is achieved in the dedicated team model.
- Dedicated teams are easily scalable, which means you can increase or decrease the team size depending on the intensity or complexity of the project.
- If you need complete control over the development process, a dedicated team model is more suitable.
Drawbacks of a Dedicated Team
The method has some drawbacks, too.
- You need to use your own resources to manage a dedicated team.
- In-house experts are required for project management.
What is Staff Augmentation, and how does it work?
IT staff augmentation is another popular outsourcing approach. Though many people get confused between staff augmentation vs. outsourcing, they are totally different. Outsourcing refers to transferring the responsibility of one or more projects to a provider company, which handles the rest.
But in staff augmentation, you just invite specific experts to join your existing team to fill the skills gap. This is highly suitable when you have an in-house team of experts, but new projects demand specific skills that your team lacks. Instead of going through the tedious hiring process, you get handpicked talents from the provider company to join your team.
Benefits of Staff Augmentation
- With staff augmentation, an app development company has more control over the team and the project.
- This method makes various aspects of projects, such as development phases, deadlines, QA, etc., more flexible.
- Staff augmentation lets you align all projects with the core values of the company.
- As you only hire talents on demand, this method can save a lot of costs incurred while hiring a dedicated team.
Drawbacks of Staff Augmentation
- Hiring too many experts through staff augmentation reduces the cohesion between team members and makes it challenging to manage the team with more virtual employees.
- The scalability is low in this method. If the project scope changes, hiring augmented staff can be tricky.
- The onboarding process is time-consuming with this method.
What is the Extended Team Model?
The extended team is a hybrid outsourcing model where you have a dedicated team for software development, but also use staff augmentation to fill the skills gap. Here’s how the model works.
Consider having a dedicated team for software development. The team is already in cohesion and coordinating very well to complete software projects. Suddenly, the team has a project requiring specific expertise that is absent in the team. In that case, you can use staff augmentation to fill that gap quickly. This is known as the extended team strategy.
Which outsourcing model is right for you?
Before you choose any of these outsourcing models, understanding the following factors is crucial. Take a quick look at them.
Project Scope
The dedicated team model will be more helpful when you have bulk projects that need longer collaboration between team members. But if you have short projects that need specific talents, staff augmentation is beneficial.
Use of Resources
If you have enough resources available to hire and train dedicated teams, you can choose that model. But if you don’t want to use that many resources after teams, staff augmentation is a more affordable solution.
Internal Management
With dedicated teams, you can have better control over the project. You define the guidelines and responsibilities and oversee the development process. But integrating augmented staff with the internal process is challenging.
Efficiency
If the project requires more efficiency, a dedicated team will be suitable for the project. This is because team members in a dedicated team are familiar with mutual capabilities. So, tasks are more intuitive for a dedicated team. Staff augmentation will require more time to reach this level of efficiency.
Conclusion
As you now know the difference between outsourcing and a dedicated team, along with other outsourcing models, it will be easier for you to figure out your needs. A dedicated team is highly suitable for long and complex projects. But the staff augmentation process will quickly fill the gaps of expertise in your team so that you can handle the changed requirements of a project. And the extended team model is the most beneficial of them all.
