April 12, 2019

How to leverage nearshore staff augmentation for software development

nearshore

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The constant evolution of digital technologies poses a crucial challenge for software development businesses. In today’s rapidly changing environment, the skill sets your business needs now may change in a matter of a few months.

Adapting to these ongoing changes becomes even harder when you’ve made a long-term commitment to expert onsite staff, as not many companies have fixed or unchanging needs. Scaling your team internally to meet any urgent IT requirements can be both expensive and risky, but what is the alternative when you need to keep up with the latest innovations and stay competitive in your industry?

IT Staff Augmentation enables businesses to meet any technical capabilities outside their core skill set by adding staff to their teams on demand. Staff augmentation companies hire and train co-located teams of developers for you to manage as a client, helping you ramp your team up or down according to your evolving needs. This way, you can significantly reduce the costs and risks of growing your team locally.

Staff Augmentation as an outsourcing strategy provides businesses with a great number of benefits:

Increasing production capacity: add seasoned developers to your existing setup on demand, while cutting through the red tape and avoiding learning curves
Flexible commitments: while most vendors aim for long-term partnerships, staff augmentation provides the ability to hire experts on a project basis without committing long-term. This way you can tap into the skills you need, on demand, with no strings attached.
Meeting urgent deadlines: whenever you have a project that requires onboarding extra resources fast, turning to staff augmentation is the path of least resistance.
Reducing costs and risks: as hiring, training and payroll are taken care of by your contractor, you won’t have to deal with the overhead costs associated with talent onboarding and instruction.

When and how to use Staff Augmentation

Staff Augmentation proves to be the most cost effective way to boost capacity without losing skills or quality. But how does it look like in practice? Let’s look at two of its most common use cases by using some of our work at VAIRIX as an example.

Complementing in-house development teams

Almost all of our work at VAIRIX involves supporting US development teams by providing a pool of highly qualified developers they can tap into as needed for their projects. Since we started back in 2010, we’ve partnered with established software companies, startups, and digital agencies to help them grow and reach their goals.

The most common scenario is for companies to initially contact us when they have a pressing need for a number of specific roles and skills in one of their current projects. We have a very straightforward engagement process for our staff augmentation services, where you get to know our leadership and interview our available team members in order to get started as soon as possible.

We usually start with smaller types of engagements where our partners can get to know the quality of our work, after which we are gradually entrusted with more project work and responsibilities. For example, one of our main partners first hired one of our developers for a two-month period, and that has evolved into a working relationship where we currently provide anywhere from 8-12 people at a time. Those developers are managed exclusively by our partner, being fully dedicated to their projects and following their workflow.

Dedicated Nearshore Development Teams

Another way in which we help businesses in the US is by providing dedicated nearshore development teams who build, scale or migrate projects in a more autonomous workflow. In this kind of scenario, our team works with you to define and prioritize the project deliverables, and then makes frequent releases of working software. By holding periodic meetings and demos, you can see your product evolve in real time, provide feedback, and together we look for areas of improvement.

The level of the team’s autonomy and involvement varies with every partner and project. In many cases, our teams have been asked to work on a specific part of a given project, like building the entire backend of an application. And we have also been responsible for tackling projects from end-to-end.

How VAIRIX can help your business

The biggest advantage of using staff augmentation is being able to directly control your own dedicated developers, who are trained in the technologies you need, work exclusively for the US market, and are available to you on demand.

Our team at VAIRIX is highly skilled in a wide array of technologies like React, React Native, Node, and Ruby on Rails, among others. We are seasoned Agile development practitioners, and we adapt to remote teams all across the United States. VAIRIX can provide the growth boost you need to avoid missing business opportunities due to lack of skilled staff to meet project goals.

To learn more about or most recent work, check out our staff augmentation case studies for Supreme Golf and CANVS.

Get in touch to learn how we can help you grow your business in the same way we’re helping our current US partners.