Staff Augmentation, Dedicated Team, or Development Center?

SENLA provides IT outsourcing services via different engagement models: staff augmentation, dedicated team and development center. What are they and which one is right for you and your business goals? Let’s find out.

With staff augmentation, one or several SENLA experts fill up or complement your in-house teams based on specialization and project requirements. For example, you might add one back-end engineer or one back-end engineer and an AQA engineer without spending much time searching and hiring these professionals.

As an IT outsourcing provider, SENLA focuses on covering a broad pool of technologies, even the niche ones like blockchain. Therefore, we can help increase your team’s overall throughput and bridge any existing skill gaps.

Outsourced experts become an integral part of your team, therefore they report directly to you. Staff augmentation is very flexible and can be customized to fit any of your organization's needs.

Short onboarding time is the biggest advantage of this model. It only takes a week for an expert to join, and you can also close several positions simultaneously.

Another upside of staff augmentation is that hiring individual contractors over regular employees helps avoid complex bureaucracy and excessive paperwork. Your obligations towards outsourced staff end where a contract ends — terminating cooperation is just as easy as starting it. 

Moreover, if the contractors don't suit you, you can easily replace them with anyone else of your choice. 

At the same time, contract-limited cooperation is also a downside because if you like the experts, you’ll want them to remain with you. In this case, staff augmentation’s nature will become an obstacle because experts are only brought in to complement your in-house workforce. They aren’t present through the entire development of a feature or a project, so they may lack some contextual knowledge that may prove necessary.

Besides, in the longer run, the most viable effects of staff augmentation — fast onboarding and related cost savings — diminish. This is because by that time, experts brought in under other engagement models with deeper integration, would accumulate more contextual knowledge and benefit a business more. 

This is why if you need anything more than temporary assistance to address increased workload, you should choose between the following two models.

Dedicated team is a step further in integration. It is designed to cover broader development tasks on longer-term projects that require a lot of customization and ongoing support.

Let's say you need to add a reporting and accounting system to your project. Your in-house team is stretched too thin, but the local market is too hot right now to quickly hire quality resources. This is where bringing in a dedicated team will be like a lifeline. 

The SENLA team will be formed and added to the project in strict accordance with the tasks, complexity, brand, and niche market at hand. We will provide you with a full coverage of required technologies, expertise and business goals in as fast as 2–4 weeks. 

A big advantage of this engagement model is that it helps you significantly reduce micro-management and allocate more time for your business objectives. This is because our dedicated teams are entirely assembled from our staff that has solid workflow practices. Upon request, each team can include all necessary personnel to support its semi-autonomous operation within your global development process.

Such an operation also brings an outside perspective to your projects. Attracted teams can offer out of the box thinking and suggest alternative ways of realizing your ideas based on their expertise and experience. At the end, these ways can actually prove to drive better results.

However, dedicated teams, despite having a comparably larger integration than augmented staff, are still limited by their respective functionalities. They don’t see a bigger picture and can only base their decisions on what they have at their disposal. In certain circumstances this can become a bottleneck.

Besides, even dedicated teams cannot fully free you from the development burden. They are just a part of your global production that you still need to oversee. On top of that, what’s also partly left on you are business processes such as payroll, accounting, etc. (we only curate our teams, your in-house developers are still managed by you). But, fortunately it is possible to fully outsource development. If this is what you need, the next engagement model is your choice.

If you want a full-cycle implementation of your project with further maintenance, opening an outsourced development center with us is exactly what you need. The center is staffed with all required SDLC experts: Business Analysts, UX/UI Designers, Architects, Scrum Masters/PMs, Developers, QAs and DevOpses.

This engagement model brings the deepest integration with all of its benefits. Since our experts develop your solution from scratch, they thoroughly study your business and its objectives to ensure the solution is properly tailored to them. 

Throughout development, the staff gets an even better understanding of your business peculiarities and accumulates contextual knowledge. All of this creates very high continuity — something really beneficial for development yet impossible to reach with any of the previous models. 

This continuity allows you to instantly adapt to any course changes or easily swap resources on the project (e.g. when development priorities change). If you try to do this with augmented staff or dedicated teams, they will first need to spend time closing the gaps.

Thus, if you plan on complex development with further support, there’s no better option than an outsourced R&D center.

It gives you some invaluable benefits:

You can also create an ultimate implementation of a development center, when you make it your permanent IT department. It means that our experts will fully cover all your development tasks and carry them out on your behalf. This gives you maximal freedom and maximal cost optimization, fully sustaining not only your development but also all related business-processes remotely.

As you can see, each model has its own peculiarities and go-to scenarios where it’ll drive you the best results. Let’s quickly sum them up.

There is no single solution for every situation as all the models have their pros and cons.

However, if you want to get the maximum out of IT outsourcing, the development center is definitely your option. With its ultimate implementation, all you need is to provide the scope and outline of the project, and we will handle the rest.