Why You need a Drupal Staff Augmentation Partner

The dynamic landscape of technology brings forth new opportunities. But new opportunities are not devoid of new challenges. When an organization faces such a challenge, they need to look for a specialist resource to fill this skill gap. However, the solution is not as straightforward as it seems. 

Finding a software developer who can quickly resolve their business-specific challenges is like finding a needle in a haystack. Moreover, the buck just doesn't stop at finding a resource. Beyond searching for talent, organizations also need to factor in their expenses in these uncertain times and ensure a long-term association of the resource with the organization. Balancing these parameters is a difficult task to attain. Thus, staff augmentation.

What is staff augmentation and how does it work?

Staff augmentation is often confused with outsourcing, while in reality, these two are as alike as apples and oranges. Outsourcing refers to delegating an entire project to an external team where the end-to-end journey of this engagement is defined. Staff augmentation on the other hand means adding or ‘augmenting’ the in-house team by adding more people to it via a third party. 

In the technology space, staff augmentation means allocating technical resources to supercharge one’s in-house development teams on flexible cooperation terms. The resource allocation can include any or all of these roles: web developers, QA engineers, and designers. This allows an organization to ‘fill in the gaps’ in their current setup or even cover the unexpected shortage in the workforce without inherently altering their development team.

This collaboration can be both short-term and long-term depending on the hiring company’s needs. Short-term cooperation generally arises on account of a temporary spike in demand, or in case of resource shortage for example when the permanent workers are on vacation. While long-term augmentations are a better solution for a project when full-time in-house hiring is not economically feasible or has been frozen for a period of time.

Benefits of Drupal Staff Augmentation Partner

Drupal is a powerful, open-source CMS that can address a wide range of organizational needs right from digital experience to composability. However, building sites does require some expertise. Similarly, leveraging its vast offering of modules is a short-time requirement but needs expertise. Thus, it makes sense to look at staff augmentation. Moreover, periodic updates and Drupal migration are a few small-term but essential needs for Drupal-based businesses. However, post-deployment, the organization may not have any additional work for the developer. This can result in staff redundancies and financial difficulties. The other key benefits of hiring a Drupal staff augmentation partner are listed below: 

• Faster allocation of required skills
  Your internal team might be fully capable of serving your regular Drupal support and maintenance needs. But they might hit a snag in case your organization needs to rapidly ramp up its Drupal architecture or features for a specific event or project. In such cases, an additional, short-term team is what the organization needs. A reliable staff augmentation company already has quick access to a huge pool of talent whose expertise can be leveraged to address this short-term need.
• Scalable team size
  For projects, such as migration, with a defined timeline, an organization needs the flexibility to easily scalable both up and down. Augmentation services allow you exactly this! Organizations can define this flexibility in their SLAs and thus are free to increase and decrease the number of developers based on ongoing business needs and budget. 
• Cost & time efficient 
  Besides paying remuneration to the resource, the recruitment process also consumes time and cost. Moreover, developing in-house skills for rapidly changing needs can be too costly an investment. Therefore, the staff augmentation approach has a competitive edge as it lets you hire a Drupal developer. Additionally, you can avoid internal training, idle time on the bench, and many other such expenses and liabilities associated with the full-time hiring of resources. 
• Faster project timelines
  The augmented team can help reduce time to market for the project or help meet challenging project deadlines quicker on account of their specialized skill set. Such teams can provide the jumpstart needed for projects plagued with marred deadlines due to unexpected resource shortages. 
• Seamless integration and complete control
  As mentioned earlier, staff augmentation services involve resource allocation within your existing setup keeping you fully in charge of all the operations. All this is a boon for quicker integration with internal processes, as well as for coherent communication, transparency, control, feedback, and skill sharing. This ease is much higher in the case of staff augmentation when compared to project outsourcing to an external team. 
  
  

The benefits of Drupal staff augmentation services are certainly attractive. However, it is the choice of partner that is critical to the success of such an engagement. It also defines the quality of workers that will be allocated to your project. Having experience with Drupal development for the past two decades, we understand the benefits as well as challenges of building with Drupal. We can help businesses navigate these challenges without reinventing the wheel. If you think this is something your organization needs, get in touch with us to explore what we can do for you.