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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Staff augmentation - is it worth it?

Staff Augmentation works well for starters but is it wise to stick to it during the long course? Well, if you have a very small capacity to plan for then by all means, go for it.

Staff Augmentation works really well if there are only a handful of resources that need to be managed. Work could be assigned to and tracked fairly easily for these resources along with your own work. Staff Augmentation also helps if the size of the projects that you typically engage on are very small - both in terms of the team size and the duration. These projects use up less than 5 members and are less than 2 elapsed months in duration. Your project is as good or as bad as the resource that you decide to bring on board. Don't blame the staffing agency for the failure or the success, blame the model!

Beyond a certain threshold (35+ resources or 5 medium sized projects), it makes sense to go for project based ownership driven model of outsourcing. It takes away the pain of staff augmentation overheads of short-listing resources, interviewing, risk of whether the resource will really work out or not, tracking the time sheets for these resources among other tasks. The risk is owned by the consulting vendor. You can sit back and manage the outcome / deliverable. You really do not care if there is resource turnover in your project, the consulting vendor is on the hook for delivering the goods. These days Tier 1 vendors have an elaborate set of metrics that could be tracked for a project which give you a fair measure of the health of your project. If you see red, a phone call to the top management of the consulting vendor is all it takes for corrective actions and investments to fall in place and lo behold! the project is back on track! It is not always this easy but life is less stressful. If the project fails, then the vendor is to be blamed! The only thing that you need to manage (and manage really well) is the expectation of the business users. Business users will need to adapt to the concept of not always having people responding to their queries right away, they will have to learn to follow some processes, learn to sign-off on deliverables (and later learn that sign-off means a sign-off), learn the hard way that requirements cannot be changed at their beck and call, it takes money to add or change requirements, well the list is long...So long as you are able to manage the business users, you are on your way to success!

The other factors are that it is a cost effective option, there could be learning that is cross leveraged across projects, knowledge could be created in a common repository and over a period of time your organization could benefit from the structure and process regimen being followed by the consulting vendor (you will never reap these benefits with staff augmentation - there is no incentive for a staffing vendor to do this for you).

Staff augmentation may look easy and less of a trouble, but friend, look beyond and there lies heaven...it takes courage to take the first step (you know what, every Tom, Dick and Harry is doing it, so just do it). And most importantly, please make the vendor successful as your success lies in the success of the vendor. It takes some effort initially but the end results are worth the effort! Come on board and enjoy the ride!

1 comment:

Marta said...

Hi there,
I work in Global Resourcing with software developers in India. My team really liked your explanation of Staff Augmentation - would it be possible to include a link or an excerpt on our internal website? Please let me know, thanks, Marta McIlroy