Different scales and sizes of businesses are leveraging the new-age IT tools and technologies and improving the efficiency of their work. There are many IT technologies out there in the global market that can give you a great level of flexibility and convenience while executing complex business processes.

You can outsource IT processes or appoint professional IT team members on a contractual basis. They can manage your IT processes, increase internal expertise, and minimize human intervention as well as cost. However, both offers the same benefits, but they are not interchangeable. They have their respective meaning, features, benefits and limitations that everyone must know before making the most of it.

What is IT staff augmentation?

Under this, companies hire an experienced team of IT experts for a certain time period on a contractual basis. You can hire them only for a specific project or duration. During that timeframe, they work as a part of your team but sometimes work remotely.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a popular term, especially in IT sector where companies off-load their complex business processes or tasks to third party professionals. Under this, you are free to provide the necessary requirements and guidelines, but don’t get involved in their processes.

Major Differences between the IT staff augmentation and outsourcing:

1. Responsibility

When it comes to the responsibility, then hiring IT staff augmentation could bring more complexities for you. You need to provide training, enhance communication channels between the in-house and new teams and a lot more.

Under the outsourcing, the service provider is completely responsible for each and every task. Your role is limited here. You just need to define and review their work performances. Therefore, it becomes essential to choose a reliable IT service provider who can understand your business and offer you the tailor-made solutions.

2. Resources

Staff augmentation is a process of getting more team member to work in association with your in-house team. This means the word is executed under the direct guidance and allows you to manage all the tasks from your end as well. In short, it focuses on getting more skilled resources.

On the other side, outsourcing concentrates on completing specific tasks from external teams. Here, the aim is to get desired results. It means you hire a professional service provider who can deliver you the solutions according to your expectations.

3. Flexibility and scalability

Scalability is one of the major differences between staff augmentation and outsourcing. Sometimes, businesses need to increase the volume of their work to achieve the designed goals. Raising workload or order volume becomes more affordable and convenient in outsourcing.

In staff augmentation, you need to pay per resource – which becomes difficult to scale the cost. Plus, it is easier to assign extra tasks than adding new members to your external team.

4. Control

Staff augmentation allows you to provide complete training to your temporary team members. Training is essential because they work in collaboration with your in-house teams and follow the business processes. You can control the external team, which in turn, help them in accomplishing the complex tasks with ease.

While the outsourcing doesn’t provide complete control as the team works outside from your business premises so you can’t supervise or control them directly.

Conclusion

These are the major differences between the staff augmentation and outsourcing that you must know while looking for a service provider for your IT-based processes. These points will help you get the best solution for your business.

Written by Andrew: Andrew associated with Syscon-Inc., a leading outsourced IT service Company. He is a passionate writer and has actively writing useful blogs and articles about technical stuffs. Connect with social profile on Linkedin and Twitter.