Staff Augmentation

Staff Augmentation (as defined by Get[Devs]):

Staff Augmentation is when you use employees hired and managed by Get[Devs] as your own. You direct their day-to-day tasks, communication & project tools, workflow, and deliverables as you would your own employees. Our employees (or to use the industry term, Staff Augments) become your ‘de-facto’ employees.

Get[Devs] legally employs the staff and is responsible for recruiting and retention, HR, benefits, and payroll administration. We keep an appropriate office environment, maintain robust IT and communications infrastructure. We are always in compliance with local laws, and resolve any other issues that may arise. It’s a distributed development team without the downsides.

Long Term Staff Augmentation aims to have employees adopting the corporate culture and common goals of the client. As ‘de-facto’ employees of the client, the staff should be completely integrated with the client’s other team members regardless of location. The staff should come to feel that they are completely aligned with their client. In our case, Get[Devs] is just there to support their needs as employees and facilitate their relationship with their client.

Distributed Development:

With the popularity of online project management tools and code version control systems, distributed software development has exploded in popularity. Distributed development is fast becoming the standard way software gets created.

Here, development work is distributed among team members who can then technically work from anywhere as long as they push code and fix bugs using the tools needed to keep everyone’s code up to date. This includes working from home, working from another city or even another country or continent altogether.

Many top tech companies use distributed development including Automattic (WordPress), Mozilla (Firefox), and Github.

On-Site or Off-Site:

On-Site Staff Augmentation has the ‘de-facto’ employees working directly in the client’s office. This is a much less common arrangement and is not currently practiced by Get[Devs].

Off-Site Staff Augmentation has the ‘de-facto’ employees working in the Get[Devs] office. Whether this office is across the street, near shore, or offshore, the efficiency stays the same. We have common working hours, language, culture, communication and productivity tools, and most importantly: common goals. This means our location is of no consequence to delivering the work needed.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation:

• Access to staff not available in local market
• Higher probability of long-term key-staff retention
• Flexibility to staff up or down quickly
• Ability to build a cross-functional team more quickly
• Ability to minimize exposure to your local labor and social benefit restrictions
• Minimize corporate overhead (HR, management, accounting & finance, etc.)
• Lower office space and office expansion costs
• Lower labor costs. Our clients find that our fully-managed fees are half to a third of their fully-loaded labor costs, all for the same or better quality staff.