IT Staff Augmentation: Increase Mobile Productivity While Maintaining Control

Lowering technology spend while maximizing IT resources has become a key initiative for enterprises worldwide. One way companies try to achieve this is by outsourcing entire groups or departments – sometimes even the entire IT team - to a third party. Another strategy growing in popularity is staff augmentation – bridging a knowledge gap in an existing team or group by supplementing it with people with specialized skills. Examples of this included utilizing an outside provider to handle specific tasks, such as service or equipment procurement, user support (help desk), or expense management. These two business strategies are very different from one another, with the key difference being the amount of control the company maintains.

The staff augmentation model allows a company to have direct control over the team, the project, and the outcome. The company adds staff to their teams based on the additional skills required to support their initiatives, and the resources are employed by the outside provider.  Thus, companies can easily and quickly ramp up and down to meet changing demand without the burden of the cost and liabilities associated with recruiting, training and employing full time workers. The staff augmentation firm also provides detailed reporting back to the company.

Among the benefits that companies may realize from staff augmentation include:

• Increased Flexibility - Whether scaling a team up or down, businesses don’t have to go through the lengthy process of recruiting, vetting and onboarding new employees, or off-boarding staff that’s no longer needed. Resources are added on a per-project basis, enabling them to respond quickly to market or industry changes.  It also affords a company more geographical and time zone flexibility, for things like 24x7 help desks or development projects with short timelines.

• Reduced Costs - Augmentation reduces or eliminates the upfront costs around employees recruitment and training, as well as ongoing costs like benefits and related taxes and operational costs including office space, equipment and supplies.  

• Immediate Specialized Expertise – Businesses get direct access to needed specialists who can help right away, without having to provide training or endure a ramp-up/learning-curve.  This model also eliminates geographic boundaries, so the candidate pool is much broader.

• Less Recruitment Hassle - All recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and on-boarding work becomes the third party’s responsibility. They find qualified candidates per the company’s requirements, but the company has the final say on who they utilize.

• Continuous Control - Companies receive regular reporting and metrics around how the augmented staff is doing and can make immediate adjustments as need arise. That is not the norm when fully outsourcing a project.

The staff augmentation model allows a business to remain flexible reassessing the talents and skill-levels of their team whenever necessary.  If hiring and training new, full-time employees isn’t in the budget, the flexibility, control, and cost benefits of staff augmentation can be a life saver for businesses.

Today many companies utilize vMOX as an extension of their internal teams. Areas where vMOX mobility lifecycle management services have provided specialized assistance include cost optimization, contract negotiation, device procurement, inventory management, help desk and mobility device logistics management.