What Is the Difference Between Staff Augmentation and Outsourcing?

Staff augmentation is a business strategy involving external talent to work alongside an organization’s core team as employees or contractors. This approach expands the existing team’s capabilities and introduces flexibility and expertise, often crucial for the project’s success.

Companies often have specific, immediate needs that their core teams might not be equipped to handle. These gaps could be in technical skills, project management, or domain expertise. Staff augmentation allows organizations to quickly onboard experts in the field, ensuring that projects can grow and gain knowledge.

When the core team needs additional help, augmentation is necessary to adhere to internal processes, follow protocol, sit in scheduled meetings, and ensure that the entire internal and external team acts as one.

Outsourcing is an external function operating on a specific module, system, or workflow in the organization with minimal internal resources. Even when a product manager (or another manager) is assigned to coordinate the work of the outsourced team, most operations follow the outsourcing team’s processes and best practices.

This ensures consistent and predictable velocity since the team (or set of individuals) operates most efficiently—with tools, systems, and processes that are tried and tested.

In augmentation, blending an external team often leads to some overhead such as moving tasks back and forth between external and internal project management systems, duplicating some retro meetings across both teams, or using tools that are foreign to the team.

It is important to be able to distinguish the two and make business decisions based on and with the help of the right solutions. Here is the recruitment guide you need to check for a solid recruitment strategy this year.

Plus, improve your management strategy with this management guide for business leaders and executives.

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