When Is Team Augmentation the Right Call for Your Project?

When your software development project starts struggling with tight deadlines or skill gaps, team augmentation might be the boost you need. But how do you know if it’s the right option for you? We explore the most common scenarios where this model can be a great asset.

With software development projects, the final goal is easy to define—a rounded, working, thriving digital product. However, to reach that goal, there are many different paths you can take. For example, you can choose between in-house software development vs outsourcing, which we’ve written about before. 

This time, we’re tackling a path that’s “neither here nor there.” It’s for those situations where you almost have what you need with your in-house team, but you’re missing that little bit of extra – be it more hands on deck, the right skill set, or the right level of expertise. 

Team augmentation is a cooperation model that gives you simple access to all of the above. It’s a great way to quickly scale your development capabilities without the long-term commitment and additional costs of hiring full-time employees.

How do you know that this is the right path for you? In this article, we’ll present some common scenarios where augmenting your internal team with additional members is a great option.

Let’s get the definition out of the way. Team augmentation is an outsourcing model where a company adds external talent to its existing software development team on a temporary, contractual basis. The added members integrate with your team and work solely on your project during all working hours. With this staff augmentation model, you get all the dedication and focus of an in-house development team but with limited duration and limited responsibilities. 

Team augmentation is your boost button on the way to product delivery. Whether you need to track down tech talent to fill specific skill gaps, meet strict deadlines, or resolve complex technical issues, it’s a plug-and-play solution that gets you to your goal hassle-free.

There are multiple benefits to team augmentation, and the model can be applied to all sorts of software development projects in all sorts of industries. With over two decades of experience in the agency business, we’ve learned to immediately recognize the situations when team augmentation is just the remedy a project needs to get to successful completion.

Here’s probably the most typical situation that calls for staff augmentation services: you’re looking at your product roadmap, you’re looking at your people and their availability, and you think, “OK, there is no way we are going to be able to pull this through.”

With good organizational skills and development culture, you can organize your project so multiple teams can work on it independently. This includes an app architecture that supports this (like Micro Frontends, for example), a smart git branching strategy, meticulous documentation, effective communication, and devoted project managers. With the right setup, you can easily assign a portion of feature development to a remote team. 

When you’re operating within a staff augmentation model, it’s essential to set the game rules in advance. You want full alignment on the coding standards and the course of the development project. The idea is to speed up the process with a staff augmentation model, not slow it down due to misunderstandings and misaligned practices. 

The added benefit of team augmentation is that this model allows you to maintain the quality of work. When you’re chasing deadlines, things can easily fly under the radar, especially with an overworked team. By bringing in skilled reinforcements, you maintain quality standards and have a better product on your hands. 

Sometimes, your increased workload is time-limited, and you’re aware of it. Maybe you’re building an additional feature or performing a complex database migration. There are many scenarios when project requirements dictate a rapid team upscale, but after the work is done, you’ll either have to downscale just as quickly or bench people.

Clearly, hiring is not the best option here. It can be time- and cost-intensive, not to mention that the lack of work likely to ensue can have a negative impact on your team’s morale. 

It is important to recognize situations where your development process has a short uptick. By leveraging staff augmentation services, you can easily scale your teams up or down. Need three more people to deliver the project? No problem; let’s upscale the team. The majority of the work is done, and the workload has decreased? That’s perfectly fine; we can downscale the team. 

How about this situation? You have an excellent development team that delivers on a daily basis, but something is missing. Maybe your current project involves a complex technical challenge they have no experience with. Maybe it’s a matter of specific technology; your team is killing it on the frontend, but you now need a backend wizard. 

You can have your team attend courses, study documentation and online tutorials, but this takes time and can never really replace hands-on experience. What you really need is an ace who will join your team and start delivering quickly and efficiently, taking those technical issues head-on. 

There’s no shame in admitting that sometimes, you don’t have what it takes in your current roster of people (maybe it’s even people skills that are missing – we’ve seen that, too). And this is where an experienced pair of hands or a fresh pair of eyes just might save the day. 

Sometimes, you want to grow your development team, but at the same time, you need things done. This will often happen to startups in the scaling phase, where it’s important to keep up with the project requirements for delivery while working on building internal teams at the same time.

Hiring full-time employees is a lengthy process; you need to find the right candidates, assess their technical skills, get them up to speed, achieve team cohesion, and as the old meme wisdom goes – ain’t nobody got time for that. 

Leveraging staff augmentation services can give you some breathing room here: Your outsourced team members will make sure those delivery tasks get done while you focus on building an in-house team for the long run. A remote team you can rely on in the early phase can save you from making any rash hiring decisions under pressure.

A great example of this scenario is our cooperation with Mara. With several outside factors at play, Mara had very strict deadlines for product launch. They knew they ultimately wanted an in-house team to work on their product, but there simply wasn’t enough time to build one. Our designers and developers worked alongside theirs, and as Mara’s internal capacities grew, we gradually downscaled our engagement. As a bonus, the arriving team members learned from existing ones and strengthened their skills in the process.

Not all projects are incredibly complex, take years to complete, or require developers by the dozen. Some types of work happen on a smaller scale or only occasionally. For example, this could be maintenance work, content migrations, updates to newer versions of operating systems, file cleanups, etc. 

This type of work is not sexy, it’s not glamorous, but it’s a reality, and we don’t advise you to ever ignore it. Instead of procrastinating about these tasks or hiring new team members for something you only need now and then, you can go with team augmentation. As mentioned before, you can upscale your internal team for a limited time duration and downscale it just as easily when the work is done. 

It’s a well-known fact that focus-switching has an enormous negative impact on the quality of delivery and can lead to mental exhaustion. Unfortunately, project work rarely happens in isolation, and prioritization is something we all do. 

For example, software development agencies will prioritize different projects at different times. On a project level, we prioritize some features over others. And when we organize work strategically, we, of course, want the best developers working on priority projects and priority features. 

This is where team augmentation can come in very handy. To save your most valuable developers from the dreaded focus-switching and give them space to deliver their best work, you can tap into an external talent pool and delegate more efficiently. 

There’s a hidden bonus here as well. When you assign less risky work to outsourced team members, you get to see them in action before you trust them with your most prized feature. You’re giving them a chance to impress you with their skills in a low-risk environment and progress to more complex tasks in the future. 

In conclusion, team augmentation is your direct path to a top-tier talent pool. By giving you plug-and-play access to specialized skills, it can accelerate your project and get you over that delivery finish line faster and with better results. 

We’ve taken you through some common real-world scenarios where team augmentation can greatly boost your chances of success and potentially even give you a strategic advantage. But the list is, as they say, by no means exhaustive. If you’re finding it hard to hit those milestones for whatever reason and want to run some project diagnostics, let us know. Maybe we can augment the situation.