IT Staff Augmentation Services: The Benefits of Augmented Teams

Recruitment is a challenge in the current digital health landscape. The industry took off during the pandemic, as healthcare approaches changed globally. Patients could no longer see their physicians face-to-face, outside of an emergency. 

In many countries, it was virtually impossible to book appointments with GPs. Healthcare facilities had to find new ways to handle appointments, and care for their patients. In the meantime, more and more people took their health into their own hands. The popularity of wearable tech continues to grow. 

Touchpoints with the healthcare industry continue to be reduced where possible, requiring the latest innovations in digital health. For example, online pharmacies are now a common approach to acquiring necessary medications. 

Facing monumental growth, the digital health industry continues to struggle with labor shortages. The US job market is facing a shortage post-COVID, but the tech industry is one of the hardest hit. Around 65% of tech leaders believe the talent shortage is seriously affecting the industry. Hiring and retaining a full team of engineers for one digital health project is virtually impossible in the current job market, so what’s the alternative?

What is Staff Augmentation

Outsourcing is a popular solution to staffing shortages in the tech industry. This involves hiring an entire team of developers from an outside partner. However, what do you do if you already have a strong team that you trust, but just don’t have the numbers to expand the project?

Staff augmentation is the practice of supplementing existing teams, with talent from a development partner. The partner supplies the staff numbers you need, and can offer a variety of expertise. Wherever you might be lacking, IT staff augmentation services can fill the gap. 

Team members might be situated in another office, or remotely, depending on your partners’ employment processes. Despite this, they are integrated with existing teams as much as possible, and in-house management work with them to guide their work. Augmented staff should be treated as in-house employees. 

Hiring IT staff augmentation services can be an effective solution to the hiring challenges that digital health development projects face. 

Improved Best Practices

Staff augmentation requires good teamwork. Ultimately, augmented staff have never worked with your business before, or on your project. The onboarding process needs to be as simple as possible, and they need to be able to integrate with your teams quickly. 

In order to achieve a smooth transition from local teams, to augmented teams, your best practices need to be clear, simple, and effective. The introduction of new engineers and workers has the potential to highlight any issues in your existing working processes. 

Use IT staff augmentation services as an opportunity to improve your company's best practices. Assess your new team members' experience with your projects, and take on board any feedback. This should make future onboarding and team integration much easier, and allow any number of people to work effectively on your digital health projects. 

Clean Code

Similar to the improvement of internal processes, staff augmentation should encourage engineers to clean up their code. In-house teams often work relatively independently. One engineer might work on one element of the project, on their own. Therefore, no one else needs to work on the code, or even see it. If changes or updates need to be made, that same engineer can carry out the additional work. 

In augmented teams, multiple people could be working on one area of the project at the same time. It’s important that all team members can contribute to any part of the project. The code needs to be clear and understandable. 

Once the project is over, and augmented staff are scaled-down, the in-house teams need to be able to continue updating the code. As a result, mistakes are less common, and work can continue efficiently. 

Deadlines

Needless to say, more staff equals more work. An IT staff augmentation company can help to increase your capacity, ultimately meeting more deadlines. 

As mentioned, the digital health industry is growing. The latest innovations continue to improve and adapt to the industries' needs. Therefore, your company needs to be able to move quickly to keep up with the rapidly expanding landscape. 

Consumer expectations are always increasing. They want the latest developments as soon as possible, and expect their health solutions to achieve more. Competition is fierce, and deadlines are challenging. Augment your in-house teams to meet your deadlines, and improve project market success. 

Experience

The tech industry talent shortage has meant that tech companies struggle to find the right expertise for their projects. Skilled engineers are in demand, and can pick projects or roles that suit them best. 

Of the available developers, many prefer roles that offer diversity during their workday. IT staff augmentation services can offer this variety, as they can work on any number of projects at once. Augmentation partners offer developer talent with a variety of experience and technical skills for your projects.

It could take a considerable amount of time to build an in-house team with the right expertise for your digital health project. The combination of the Great Resignation, and increased engineer career expectations, has seen employee retention numbers plummet. Consider taking advantage of the best expertise that augmentation partners have to offer. 

Scalable 

Recruitment is a lengthy process. Assuming you can maintain your existing employees, it can take months to build a team of dedicated developers to prepare for a new project. In the tech industry, building an in-house team is also somewhat short-sighted. 

Projects expand and shrink according to the demand of the industry. For instance, you might need 100 developers to build your project, but only 20 to maintain it once completed. A hire and fire policy would create a poor company culture, so what’s the alternative?

IT staff augmentation services are scalable. Your development partner can supplement your teams as needed, and then reduce them when the time comes. One partner might work with multiple companies at the same time. This makes it easier for engineers to be re-assigned, once an IT project comes to an end. 

Your project receives the necessary staff, and employees benefit from job security. Everybody wins. 

At Vertrical, we have teams of engineers, business analysts, compliance experts, and more, ready to assist your development projects. Let our teams supplement your in-house developers to get your project moving. Get in touch today.