Enterprises of all sizes today are optimizing for speed when developing their latest products and applications. The startup and enterprise adoption of practices like DevOps and Agile methodologies has helped companies reach market faster and get quick market feedback. Although the speed and time to market are great benefits of fast product deployment, many companies end up with technical debt as a result. Technical debt accumulates as companies expedite development of products and this results in more rework for the development team. Corporations of all sizes have started to explore IT staff augmentation as a solution to their rising technical debt.
What is IT staff augmentation?
IT staff augmentation is an outsourcing strategy where companies hire skilled workers on a contract basis to make up for their talent shortage. This is a great alternative to recruiting, hiring and onboarding a full-time skilled worker. With IT staff augmentation, the problem of resource and talent allocation is solved. Augmented staff come to work with all the skills and resources needed to complement an enterprise and finish a project. Within days, these skilled workers can be onboarded easily and start working alongside your developers and management to tackle your largest projects.
How can IT staff augmentation help with technical debt?
Labor shortage: Finding technical talent in this market can be costly and time consuming. With technical debt piling up, you cannot afford to wait months to onboard a new hire to help with development work. Augmented staff are ready and can step in immediately to address the technical debt of your company. This will help reduce your technical debt and help you resume your normal operations.
Skill gap shortage: Depending on the type of product you are shipping; you may need a specific type of developer to help you do the rework for a product. For example, if you are shipping a product that requires knowledge of a specific tech stack, you need someone with prior experience to help do the rework. Augmented staff are skilled in the tools and technologies you use, and they can be incorporated immediately into your workflow to help address any skill gap shortages.
Flexibility: IT staff augmentation can help businesses address their short term and long-term technical debt. If a company has an instance of technical debt and wants to go back to normal operations, they can hire augmented staff for a short period to address development needs. If the company wants to hire for medium to long term, augmented staff can be a placeholder until the company finds full-time workers.
Prevention of future technical debt: With augmented staff complementing your existing staff, you can avoid technical debt in the future. Instead of shipping code quickly and doing a lot of rework, you’ll have the help of augmented staff to address technical debt before it happens. This allows your team to focus on writing and shipping code instead of spending weeks doing rework for one deployment.
To learn more about the benefits of having IT staff augmentation, click here.