Are you considering using Staff Augmentation as means to scale your technological team?
Is it the right solution for you? What should you consider before jumping right into it?
In 2020 we have seen how our clients, both startups and SMEs, were struggling with big money losses, becoming forced to cut costs and shift towards a more light structure. In 2021 this trend has consolidated and even increased for many of them.
With this scenario and the uncertainty we still have ahead of ourselves, many companies contact us to explore this new model and answer their most common questions: “how would it be to hire a team from LambdaLoopers?” and “how is it going to affect our internal operations?”.
The Challenge
You will be able to find several blog posts talking about the benefits and virtues of Staff Augmentation; some of them being: gaining access to a large talent pool, cost-effectiveness, higher flexibility, and time efficiency just to name a few of them.
It sounds pretty good, but it’s definitely not a plug-and-play approach and requires a lot of team engineering and fine-tuning to get the results that you are looking for. Some of the major issues to asses are:
- More people means more speed, so you should clearly know if your product and your business are ready to accelerate. More speed without a clear direction is definitely something you want to avoid.
- More people do not imply better results. Building an effective engineering team takes time and a lot of fine-tuning. You cannot expect to add 5 new engineers, unknown to each other, and get good results from the get-go.
- Reality might differ from the initial promise, as the staffing and HR companies might oversell the quality and expertise of their candidates so most of the time they don’t meet the initial expectations.
- Culture and values are fundamental for achieving the results desired. Adding people without properly assessing their cultural fit will cause multiple problems in terms of communication and transparency, affecting the quality of the deliverables.
So, on paper, the new workforce enhances the capacity and the ability to meet deadlines and take over the competition, but in reality, there are cultural and operational issues to address.
From challenge to opportunity
The question you should ask yourself is if your organization is ready to grow and to manage more complexity. There is always room for improvement and the opportunity to add more workforce is not just to get more and better results, but also to enhance and streamline your operations while increasing team performance and cultural fit.
Many companies are improving these concepts while increasing the workforce by partnering with external agencies. The benefits you can get from joining forces with another company that offers you a full coordinated team are:
- The agency has the capability to engineer a team that fits the company’s needs both technically and culturally.
- The team deployed by the agency has the experience and proven results working in several software projects together.
- That team can be easily fine-tuned according to the company’s requirements and feedback within the first steps of the collaboration.
- The team has the ability to share and implement a solid and efficient work methodology that the company will benefit from. Synchronizing both operatives might be a challenge but it’s totally doable and it will certainly help to improve streamline the company’s operations and team scalability.
- The team consists of different roles and responsibilities to ensure the quality of the delivery. These roles can be balanced according to the company’s needs and can be Digital Consultant, Account Manager, Product Owner, Technical Lead, UX/UI Designer, and Software Engineer, in the case of LambdaLoopers’ structure.
How our clients are taking benefit of Staff Augmentation Collaborations
At LambdaLoopers we have had the opportunity to explore this collaboration model with several companies as their staff augmentation agency. Although each case has its own nuances, the overall results and conclusions have proven it to be successful.
A Series B technological startup based in Zürich that it’s disrupting how medium and big companies manage employee engagement. The challenge was to seamlessly integrate with their work operations and streamline the collaboration with their team in Switzerland and the new Development team based in Spain. Aside from many barriers both operational and cultural, we have been able to integrate with their team and help them achieve their product and roadmap goals as well as meeting their investors’ expectations.
Another example is a regional mid-size IT company that came to LambdaLoopers looking to consolidate their team to develop a new and disruptive product for the company, based on a new business case. In this case, not only did our development team join forces alongside other outsourced teams working for the company, but it was able to gain the expertise and lead the operations to a successful product launch, as well as create other augmented teams between LambdaLoopers and the client in areas such as sales, marketing, and design.
Finally, to mention another example of how our team can integrate into a client’s organization to become a successful partnership is a Cybersecurity company that joined LambdaLooper’s development team to create a tailor-made solution for a client. With our team’s support, the solution was successfully and on time implemented on the client’s platform, our team led the integrations following our client’s company culture and values, and now the solution is being productized to be sold to other clients with the support of the sales and marketing teams.
Conclusions
These new hybrid collaboration formats are here to stay. Many companies are already training and refining their operatives and teams to be able to get the most out of them.
These companies are the ones who will be better suited to open and close partnerships in a new collaborative digital era. This flexibility and readiness to scale in specific situations will be their edge to surpass competitors and market swings.
Eduard Barroso — CCO, Partner at LambdaLoopers
Andreína Pérez — Account Manager at LambdaLoopers
If you want more information or would like to evaluate how a Staff Augmentation collaboration would fit your current operative, do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
