Talent shortages are occurring across every industry, but when you’re in the middle of a cloud migration or infrastructure upgrade, you may feel as if shortages are hitting you particularly hard. When faced with a talent shortage, it may be beneficial to outsource IT to meet a deadline or stay on target with a project.
If your organization has been hobbling along shorthanded for months, or years, you may have learned to run lean. However, it may not be sustainable if you are pursuing a digital transformation strategy or pushing a cloud migration through. Here are five reasons you may want to consider a staff augmentation plan:
Specific Skills
Whether you need to offload repetitive tasks or monitoring in order to free-up your more advanced team members, or you’re finding that you need specific DevOps skills for a project, the decision to outsource IT often comes down to skill shortages.
Time for Training
If you’re already behind on a project, the time it takes to onboard and train a new employee can be daunting. With staff augmentation, you specify what tasks are needed and a skilled outsourced team member will step in and complete the project.
Cost
In addition to the additional costs that time and training can add to the equation, you also need to think about salary and benefits, plus the scalability factor. If you need additional talent about 15 hours a week, you won’t want to hire those skills in-house.
Expertise
Vetting a new employee, to make sure they have the specific skill set you need, is a costly and time-consuming process. When you outsource IT, the provider certifies the staff and fulfills your request with the right level of expertise.
Flexibility
Maybe you need someone who specializes in virtualized networking solutions implementation, but once you’ve upgraded your network, you’ll be moving on to another project. When you outsource IT, you have the flexibility to get the skills you need for each project, and then move on to a different staff augmentation solution for the next item on your list.
Once you’ve determined that these benefits make your company a good match for outsourcing IT, there are a few key steps you’ll want to include in your planning process:
- Meet with your team and discuss the talent gaps you need to address. Get their thoughts on the risks and benefits of outsourcing for your current needs, as well as those that might be in the near future.
- Develop a timeline with benchmarks that will aid you in pursuing an outsourced solution.
- Identify the providers that not only have the right talent and skills available for your project, but that also share a similar approach to company culture and even cyber security.
- Initiate the outsourcing process, keeping note of your timeline and benchmarks to determine the success of your staff augmentation solution.
If your company is about to pursue an infrastructure upgrade or cloud migration, or simply needs to address staff shortages, contact us at Proper Connections. We can equip you with the talent and skills you need to address today’s looming deadline, and plan for your next project.