demand management

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the Agile methodology

Staff augmentation is a perfect way of using temporary workers or contractors to fill the skill gap for short-term or long term positioning.

It usually happens through an agency that keeps a record of such workers. For instance, you have a big project that requires several developers, but your in-house team lacks the required workforce. So in such a case, you can augment a team remotely and work on such projects.

Another scenario could be an organization that takes a particular project, and the deliverables timeline is approximately six months. But an organization lacks the skillset to work on those projects.

You could hire as a permanent employee, but there will be no work after completing the projects, and firing them could raise problems. An obvious solution is to augment trained and qualified workers who can work collaboratively and efficiently with your team until delivering the projects.

Types of Staff Augumentation

There are generally two types of augmentation models, i.e., short-term and long-term services.

Short-Term Services

Types of service models that can be adopted during periods of increased demand for employees or when in-house teams are unavailable for a certain period.

Long-Term Services

Types of service models that are more suitable for big projects filling a skill gap, cutting operational costs, or not preferred in-house hiring processes.

We can further categorize staff augmentation into the following three types, namely:

Commodity

When you need reliable workers to perform tasks that don’t require a specific skillset—for instance, factory or warehouse work, manual labor, etc.

Skill Based

You require a specific skillset (typing, spreadsheet use, multi-lingual), but the relative skill level is not crucial.

Highly Skilled

You require more advanced skills that are only attainable via significant training and experience, which is also crucial. Here specialist matters the most than the generalist.