Staff augmentation is a flexible approach that enables businesses to supplement their existing teams with experts, filling talent gaps and allowing them to undertake complex projects and achieve business goals and objectives. IT staff augmentation services have received immense popularity in this fast-paced business environment, where businesses strive to find niche skills without stressing their budget. 

However, similar to every commercial venture, staff augmentation also has its own difficulties and challenges. Common staff augmentation mistakes hinder the potential benefits of this staffing model and compromise the project's success. This is why it is important to carefully consider and manage the staffing process. 

In this article, we have identified some of the common pitfalls of IT staff augmentation and offered steps to avoid them. 

Ready?

Let’s begin. 

Common Staff Augmentation Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them

1. Not Having Defined Roles

Hiring developers without knowing what roles they will be taking up will make things more complicated. Start-ups are constantly in need of more hands to complete projects on time and establish credibility. But expanding your team without any predetermined expectations, goals, and roles. 

What to do?

Have a clear understanding of your requirements and the expected deliverables from each augmented member. Consider communicating the same with your internal teams to ensure better collaboration and integration.

The best way is to prepare onboarding materials like you would when hiring for an internal team. Ensure your onboarding document clearly specifies goals, timelines, features, tools, and communication expectations. 

2. Assuming They Will Do It on Their Own 

Albeit your augmented staff is experienced and skilled. However, assuming your augmented developer will have instant understanding of your product/service, team’s culture, tool, internal culture, and dynamics even before onboarding is a grave mistake you can make. 

Even the most excellent developers of all time require context when starting a project. No one can contribute to completing a project or enhancing the quality without a full understanding. 

The best way to avoid staff augmentation issues is to provide detailed project information, along with relevant documents, videos, reports, and other essential materials that you have. When onboarding an augmented staff, assign a buddy or team lead who can guide. To begin with, consider having a Q&A session with them to avoid confusion and answer queries. 

3. Lack of Communication

Lack of communication can lead to bad business. Nearshore or remote staff may feel disconnected, leading to misunderstandings, miscommunications, and missed deadlines. 

Thus, communication is at the heart of staff augmentation best practices. Set up daily stand-ups or bi-weekly meetings to check in on the status of work, identify difficulties and challenges faced, and figure out ways to overcome them.  

4. Overloading Augmented Staff

Most businesses tend to overload their augmented staff with excessive work and provide little to no support. Regardless of how experienced and skilled they are, expecting your augmented developers to own your product without proper support or authority is a mistake that you should avoid. 

The best way to address this is to empower internal leads to make critical decisions. Also, utilize your augmented developer to do what they do best, ensuring they execute plans effectively and quickly. 

5. Choosing the Wrong IT Staff Augmentation Vendors

Selecting the cheapest or fastest vendor can cost you quality and support. The wrong vendor can lead to misaligned skillsets, vulnerable IP protection, data breaches, unclear contracts, and a lack of support or replacement. 

Choosing a reliable IT staff augmentation company will ensure clear communication, flexible engagement, cultural fit, better collaboration, timezone alignment, etc. 

6. Considering Augmentation Only as a Short-Term Fix

One of the key features of staff augmentation is that it allows businesses to hire developers on a temporary basis, enabling them to scale their team up or down as per requirements. However, most companies view staff augmentation as a short-term solution only.

This limits the team's strategic capability for developing a sustainable velocity. Instead, staff augmentation should be leveraged to balance your in-house capacity, define project roadmaps, and ensure long-term hybrid teams for better project management. 

7. Avoiding Legal and IP Considerations

Avoiding legal and IP considerations can be alarming. Thus, make sure all your staff (augmented and in-house) sign the NDA. Also, ensure that your vendor agreement prioritizes IP transfer language and data security. You can also secure development environments and integrate access control for better security. 

Other mistakes to avoid in staff augmentation include not having a project manager, compromising on quality for cost, overlooking budget shortfalls, and neglecting diversity. Having a clear understanding of the challenges that these mistakes can pose and working to avoid them will ensure a greater speed of delivery, increased flexibility, better quality code, lower risk, and more. 

Summing Up

IT staff augmentation is gaining traction, as it enables businesses to strengthen their IT teams and manage complex projects without compromising their budgets. Unlike traditional hiring, where companies must take on the stress of recruitment, onboarding, salary processing, and providing other employee benefits, staff augmentation enables firms to hire niche skills on a temporary basis and address urgent project requirements. 

However, despite numerous benefits, staff augmentation comes with multiple pitfalls that can sabotage your purpose of investing in this hiring model. Thus, understanding the staff augmentation do’s and don’ts is crucial to ensure that you overcome the above-mentioned hiring mistakes that often occur. 

Understanding your project’s goals and requirements, team skills and experience, and hiring the best IT staff augmentation firm in USA will help you bring a significant advantage to your business.