If you are considering engaging an offshore IT consulting partner, you will want to carefully assess the experience of the service provider and ensure that the business model, methodologies and skills of the business and the team are what you need to achieve a successful outcome.
If your business is ready to engage an IT Staff Augmentation Partner, you have already decided you need and want help. Whether your enterprise wants support for a one-time software application development project, ongoing support for enterprise systems or trained expertise in a particular technology environment, you want to be sure you get the right resources, the right knowledge and the right support! In this article, we outline three questions to ask a prospective IT staff augmentation partner.
If your business needs help with technology, it may be because your IT team is too busy to take on a one-time project or it may be that your team does not have the specific skills required to complete the project you have conceived. Perhaps your business is just getting started and does not yet have the IT team it needs to do the work. Maybe yours is a software business that needs a partner to help develop a software product for market or to add functionality and services for existing clients. In short, there are many reasons, a business might reach out for help.
Trust me, I get it! The need for expert, experienced software application developers is constant, and in this rapidly changing technology environment, it is sometimes difficult to sustain cutting-edge IT skills and provide expert resources to accommodate the changing and growing needs of the organization. In order to meet business requirements, an enterprise must maintain a balanced, skilled IT team to enhance and support the business with innovative, high-value, low-cost applications development, and maintenance and support services, backed by timely, proven processes and methodologies.
I recently spoke to a friend who was grappling with a real problem. She had just come from a staff meeting where senior executives announced their intention to create a business application for sale to the market. Senior management was quite excited about the opportunity but all my friend could see were problems. The idea itself was great but the execution would definitely be an issue. The existing internal IT staff did not have the time, the resources or the skills to get the job done but my friend knew she would have to find a way.
There are many reasons to engage an IT consultant and employ IT staff augmentation and there are many benefits when it is done right. Businesses can quickly scale up and down to accommodate a project or meet a need. They can engage talent with specific skills and training to meet the requirements of their current and future business landscape. The business can mitigate the cost of training to keep IT skills current, and ensure staffing flexibility to fill in the gaps in a project team or for ongoing support, and it can accommodate its budget with the right experience, training and skills at an affordable cost. In this article, we discuss four areas of caution and attention your business must consider before engaging a partner for IT staff augmentation.
As an in-house IT manager, a CIO, a CTO or a business professional, you may already have grasped the critical need for additional help on an IT project – whether it is ongoing assistance or help for a standalone project. You see the full picture. You know your IT team is overwhelmed, you know their skill set and you know you can’t get the job done with the existing knowledge and resources you have. You also understand the importance of getting that job done quickly and effectively.
You started your business with high hopes and you find that you have more ideas and more plans for expansion and growth than you can handle with your existing skills and team members. If you are a start-up or an entrepreneur and find yourself in a constant state of creation with little to no resources to make your dreams a reality, you might want to consider a technology partner.
When a business has more IT projects and initiatives than it can handle, it will often look to hire more internal IT staff members. But hiring takes time, interviewing is imperfect and part time or full time employees require management, benefits and office space. While a business might need one-time project support, or ongoing support for development, maintenance and support, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to staffing. In addition to these issues, there is the very real issue of ongoing training and skills enhancement. That costs money and, when a team member is out for training, someone else must cover for that team member. So, what is a business to do?
With the pace of technology change and the demands of consumers and business users, the average IT department in an enterprise is often challenged to deliver the wide range of services required by the company. From infrastructure management to software development, data integration initiatives, reporting, and upgrades, IT is always too busy and too short staffed.
