IT Staff Augmentation Services: Maximizing Your IT Team Capabilities

For almost a decade now — and at various other times over the course of history — attracting the right highly-skilled talent has become elusive for many organizations. In fact, Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey reported 50% of executives considered talent acquisition a major internal challenge for meeting their overall organization’s strategic priorities.

With the changing talent landscape in IT caused by emerging technologies, digital transformation, and geographical limitations, many companies now leverage a better alternative — staff augmentation.

This staffing model allows companies to temporarily add relevant talent to their existing team through an external source. The approach helps businesses save hiring costs and resources, close the talent gap quickly, achieve specific project goals within a shorter time, and quickly scale.

However, one thing to note is that many IT augmentation services exist today, but with different offerings. Growth Acceleration Partners is a consulting and technology services company. Aside from offering advisory services, end-to-end solutions for software and data engineering, and modernization tools, at GAP, staff augmentation is one of our core services. We’ve adapted this model to support businesses in the U.S. in solving their complex technology and software problems.

In this article, we’ll uncover more about the values embedded in embracing nearshore staff augmentation and how GAP can support you. We also seek long-term partnerships with clients to strengthen and support your existing teams with our team of experts. Ready to see how we make this happen?

Keep reading.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation Services

It’s no longer news that many tech executives are choosing different forms of staff models to boost their team stability, one of which is IT augmentation. But how good is it? Let’s see some of its benefits:

Time and Cost Saving

While a more general hiring process may take four weeks or less, it may take roughly 20 to 60 days to hire a software developer in the U.S.

Now imagine having to hire five experts to join your team to handle a project that has been scheduled to run for a shorter period. Considering the hiring process, onboarding, project planning, aligning the new hires to your organizational value, and the ongoing project, this could negatively affect productivity, project timelines, client expectations, and overall business goals.

However, with GAP’s IT staff augmentation service, you can bypass typical recruitment delays. Our proprietary talent assessment framework and pre-vetted expert network allow us to assemble the right team quickly. We match specialists based on skills, cultural fit, and project needs, ensuring seamless integration and immediate productivity.

Delivering impactful technology requires both speed and accuracy. At GAP, we quickly review our team of specialists across different skill levels — including data science, data engineering, business intelligence, and more — and choose the most relevant for your project. This cuts a lot of hiring time by over 50% and helps you get the project executed quickly.

GAPsters work hard to ensure your technology investment is delivered efficiently, effectively, and on time. An example was when ZenBusiness partnered with GAP to build up its engineering team with high-quality global talent. We used our robust infrastructure and support allowing ZenBusiness more time to concentrate on its products.

ZenBusiness partnered with GAP to fuel their growth, shorten the talent acquisition process, and diversify their workforce. GAP played a key role in quickly scaling engineering talent during this high-growth period and shared important strategies for managing a remote, multicultural team.

Source: Success Stories – ZenBusiness

Access to the Best Specialized Talent

As data keeps pointing to the global shortage of tech talents, IT and data skills are at the forefront of this widespread challenge. A perfect illustration is when over 95% of tech leaders reported an inability to get IT applicants with the skill sets needed to support projects involving AI, machine learning, IT cloud projects, software engineering, and development.

While remote work and freelancing may help certain businesses fill these gaps quickly, what about organizations needing to hire specialized skills within their geographical jurisdiction quickly?

An example of the challenge to access the right expertise within the U.S. happened with Revealix, a digital health platform in Texas, which needed to make its diabetic foot healthcare solution available to a broader audience but required a specific skill set. GAP with its team of experts in both LatAm and the U.S. joined Revealix and leveraged its unique specialized secret sauce — the GAPBuilt Accelerator — to support Revealix in getting the project executed.

At GAP, we hire the best talent. It is part of our mission to invest in people and support their growth. This principle has helped us nurture the best talent you may need for your project.

Revealix’s founder, Adrianna Cantu, has deep clinical and operational expertise in wound care and in understanding the factors that lead to limb loss, and the company’s engineering and technical team has vast experience in designing and delivering custom software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. But this does not translate to cloud infrastructure building and deployment. Revealix uses AWS infrastructure due to its ubiquity and was using Docker for container management and provisioning. But the company hit roadblocks when building out the development, staging, and production environments where the commercial application would run.

“We had basic app/cloud connections before, but now we’re getting the commercial-grade product ready, and that’s very different,” Cantu said.

Read more here.

Faster Scalability

Still, with the above case study, Revealix augmented their existing team with GAP’s expertise rather than spending valuable days dedicated to hiring the required talent to handle the specific roadblock. The result was that the GAP solution dramatically reduced development time, potentially accelerating the product’s path to market readiness.

— the GAPBuilt Accelerator, which the client could deploy and evolve at the touch of a button. As a value-add, GAP walked the client through the infrastructure and outlined best practices. The competitive advantage was in utilizing a specific Accelerator for scalable web applications, which leverages IaC capabilities with reusable architectural components, enabling greater quality, consistency, scalability, repeatability, and customization. This solution greatly reduces time to value for the end user.

Source: Success stories

Comparing Staff Augmentation With Other Staffing Models

As mentioned earlier, staff augmentation is one of the many staffing strategies available in the modern job market today. Let’s see how it fares against other options.

Staff Augmentation vs. Software Outsourcing

While often used interchangeably, staff augmentation and outsourcing differ in scope and management. Software outsourcing involves delegating entire project responsibility to a service provider, which can be beneficial if you lack resources for oversight but may lead to less control over the process.

Staff augmentation, conversely, allows you to maintain project management control while accessing specialized skills. It often integrates well with agile teams, focusing on processes rather than just results.

At GAP, we offer both services. We work with clients to understand their needs and recommend the best approach— staff augmentation, outsourcing, or a hybrid model. This flexibility ensures we deliver the most effective solution for each project, balancing control and expertise as needed.

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services

As staff augmentation involves getting extra expert hands to join your team to complete a project, managed service brings their team to handle the whole project.

For example, say you need to work on a particular software and deploy it using cloud-native architecture and DevOps methodologies. You have an in-house team of developers but need more expertise in these specific areas. Instead of hiring full-time team members skilled in cloud technologies and DevOps practices, you hire specialized talents temporarily to join your team, work with your developers, and operate under your direction.

In the case of managed services, the provider takes over the software project process using their team, tools, and processes while you supervise to ensure their result aligns with your goals.

To quickly understand how staff augmentation compares with other options, here’s a table comparing it against software outsourcing and managed services.

	Staff Augmentation	Software Outsourcing	Managed Services
Have complete control of your team	✔	✘	✔ / ✘
Get expert hands to influence your team’s performance	✔	✘	✔
Requires significant upfront investment	✘	✔	✘
Get your product to the market quickly	✔	✔ / ✘	✔ / ✘
Open to long-term partnerships	✔	✘	✔ / ✘
Supports Agile principles	✔	✘	✘

Choosing From Multitudes of Options

Now that you understand how staff augmentation can significantly benefit your business processes, choosing the right partner may be overwhelming. To ease the decision process, consider the following elements.

• Track record: Take adequate time to understand and read every success story of the IT service provider you evaluate. Ensure they have consistent high-quality service that aligns with your industry or project needs. For instance, at GAP — leveraging our 17 years in business and 20 industry awards — our unique value and consistency in helping businesses achieve their software goals has led to countless success stories. Below are some of our success stories you may find interesting.

CN2 Success story:

Read more: Success Stories – CN2

Accruent Success Story

Read more: Success Stories – Accruent

 

• Talent pool: Remember, your goal is to skip the tedious hiring process and time by choosing a proper service. Ensure you choose a service or company with a suitable up-to-date talent pool and an excellent retention rate.

For instance, GAP has a high employee retention rate. See the data below:

• 600+ engineers
• Avg. Experience: 7+ years
• Avg. Tenure: 4+ years
• Avg. Turnover: < 11%
• Overall retention: > 80%
• Strategic retention: >97%

GAP also has 13 Technical Centers of Excellence (CoE) covering nearly two dozen topics, which improves the technical excellence of GAPsters by creating a strong community to support continuous learning. To achieve continuous professional development of our experts, GAP leverages an internal training platform called GAP Academy, in addition to online learning, workshops, bootcamps and more.

• Pricing: Evaluate the cost of permanently hiring or training your in-house development team in comparison with augmenting your team to add specific external skilled talents. Typically, nearshore is less expensive than onshore. But not all nearshore companies are the same. As you compare your expenses, ensure your priorities align with the value provided and the criticality of experience needed for the project. As an example, clients that decided to use GAP for staff augmentation are able to achieve the intended high-quality delivery of their software but for 70-90% of the cost compared to long-term in-house hires.

While there are several elements to consider, taking time to carefully evaluate the three areas mentioned above could save you from stress and help you make more informed decisions.

GAP vs. Competitors

GAP offers nearshore IT staff augmentation service in the U.S. with our pool of talent that extends to all over the Americas. With a steady history of organic growth and a multitude of success stories from supporting businesses, we have mastered the field with highly-skilled engineers operating within the U.S. time zones.

Learn more about our unique process below:

Enhance Your Team Performance Today

As you read this, there’s still a shortage of qualified talents in the IT industry as emerging technologies keep shaping software requirements.

Now the question: Would you prefer spending tons of time and resources searching for the right talent to join your team? You may not get the experienced talent with the specialized skills you need.

To bridge the gap between the shortage of talent and keeping pace with tech demands in your team, think GAP. We’re the vanguard of technological innovation in fields like AI, UX/UI, and QA automation. With expertise in UI frameworks like Angular, React, React Native, and Vue, we ensure you get future-focused, adaptable code.

We offer nearshore IT staff augmentation service and our team of experts in your timezone ensures timely delivery and quick understanding of your organizational culture and goals. We can provide your organization with resources in the following areas:

• Software development for cloud and mobile applications
• Data analytics and data science
• Information systems
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Predictive modeling
• QA and QA Automation

Also, while staff augmentation is certainly offered, GAP also specializes in a unique approach that features a rigorous four-step team design and hiring process, emphasizing talent acquisition and retention. The GAP Success Sequence enhances operations for mutual accountability and seamless communication. GAP’s enterprise-level expertise, transparent processes, agile methodologies, and secure IT infrastructure ensures steady project performance and maximum productivity while maintaining alignment with client goals.

If you’d like to find out more, schedule a call with us today.