How Total Performance Consulting Can Grow Your Team Through Staff Augmentation
How Total Performance Consulting Can Grow Your Team Through Staff Augmentation
38% of the US is slated to fall into economic recession by November of 2023.
Today, companies in various industries are engaging in company-wide layoffs to weather the coming storm.
However, demand (especially client demand in business-to-business sectors) has yet to dip.
How do you augment the capacity of your organization in order to scale effectively? Furthermore, how do you know you’ve got the right developer for the project?
In this article, Total Performance Consulting discusses staff augmentation and how to use it strategically in the coming year.
We’ll cover:
- What staff augmentation is and why it’s important
- The different staff augmentation models
- Common issues companies face using staff augmentation
- Industry-specific knowledge
- Business requirements vs. technical requirements
What Is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation is a low-cost outsourcing solution to hire the capabilities your business needs.
The augmented staff of your organization will be directly handled by your business, just like your actual employees.
That covers the basics of staff augmentation. Here’s how we’ve developed staff augmentation into something more sophisticated.
Why Use Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation can save your business. For that reason, it has become an increasingly popular trend.
Why, exactly, are so many businesses opting for staff augmentation? There are all kinds of scenarios that make this staffing model a good idea. Such as:
- It can increase your business capacity.
- If there’s a temporary spike in demand, you can easily address this through augmentation.
- You need a specialized skill set for a short period of time or a specific project.
- You want to improve the flexibility of the way your business operates, taking on a more agile approach to staffing.
Either way, augmenting your staff is an excellent solution.
However, this type of team augmentation will only be successful if you follow the right approach.
Total Performance Consulting takes a strategic long-term perspective when it comes to helping you grow your team of developers. We differ from many companies that run with a short-term mindset. This helps businesses achieve greater value from the augmentation process.
Using the Right Staff Augmentation Model
There are various staff augmentation models that you can choose for your business. This includes types of augmentation, as well as different service models for engaging outsourced talent.
The model you choose should depend on the specific needs of your organization.
The three common models are:
- Commodity: Basic staff that doesn’t require a specific skill set
- Skill-based: Staff with certain skills at any level
- Highly-skilled: Staff with more advanced skills that are only obtainable through specific training and experience
At Total Performance Consulting, we deal with highly-skilled staff augmentation. We use a model that focuses on aligning the augmented staff with specific business objectives. We achieve this through our mindset of finding a long-term strategic fit for each role.
Key Issues Companies Face With Staff Augmentation
When it comes to growing your team with external developers, different vendors can provide vastly different experiences. Total Performance Consulting understands the challenges. That’s why we’ve structured our services differently so that we can serve both your short-term and long-term strategic vision.
Here are a few important issues that Total Performance Consulting takes a different approach to.
Top 1% of candidates is a myth
One of the crucial elements in scaling your team with service providers is finding the right fit and a high acceptance rate to fill vacant positions.
When bringing in external developers who come from different backgrounds working remotely, maintaining a transparent system of communication with the service provider is invaluable.
Total Performance Consulting starts communication very early on in the process. And while other service providers take a more administrative role, Total Performance Consulting realizes there is more to maintaining strong communication. This is why we focus on things like industry knowledge and domain expertise.
We’ve found a unique approach to communication very early on in the recruitment phase. It minimizes overhead for your busy executives and results in higher acceptance rates by candidates for specific jobs. You’ll be able to start your projects sooner and with a much greater level of productivity from well-matched developers.
Forget 1%, our acceptance rates are as high as 50%!
Specific Sector Knowledge
To set your business and technical teams up with the right developer, it’s essential to properly understand the nuances of your specific industry. This is often overlooked, which can make working with an individual a serious challenge.
For example, developers who have worked in similar industries to yours in the past will know the nuances and technical issues specific to your industry.
But, while there are many great developers out there, you might struggle to find one experienced in your industry or niche.
Essentially, it’s easy to end up with an external developer that isn’t a great match for your specific business.
To address this issue, we have developed our unique internal portal called TOTAL INSIGHTS (TM). Through this portal, we curate and develop industry-specific knowledge and institutionalize it. This allows us to align the developers even before they have spent an hour with you.
So, as you onboard a brand new developer with us, they will already be up to date with issues specific to your industry.
Business Objectives Should Drive Tech Solutions, Not the Other Way Around
There’s a big difference between business requirements and technical requirements. When augmenting staff, alignment between these two areas is often overlooked. If this is the case, you can expect sub-par outcomes.
Many companies don’t even realize the issue of business alignment and what kind of friction it can cause.
Total Performance Consulting has a deep understanding of these issues. So, we took a different approach to improve staff augmentation.
The outdated approach is to use a customer success manager to overlook the administrative aspects of a project. Sure, this can help make things operate more smoothly. But, it doesn’t necessarily create a strong alignment between each project and the business objective.
We changed this approach by pairing each project with a dedicated business lead. The business lead makes sure the technical path is optimized for specific business outcomes, instead of just providing an optimized technical solution on a stand-alone basis.
This approach guides projects along a set of viable technical paths that are best for business outcomes. It’s a more customized, personalized approach that achieves better results for every possible business scenario.
Our unique offering is what we refer to as TOTAL PAIR (TM). As the name suggests, it’s about creating more powerful, impactful business pairings.
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