Managed Services vs. Staff Augmentation – a head-to-head comparison

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With the growth of the IT outsourcing industry over the past decade, managed services vs. staff augmentation have become a heated debate amongst businesspeople. 

Managed services and staff augmentation are two services that businesses often use interchangeably. The confusion is understandable—considering they both have their roots in IT outsourcing. In reality, comparing both of them is like comparing a telescope to a microscope. Despite some basic similarities, the two are entirely different in their functionalities and form.

But one shared benefit of these services is that companies can access external resources for their time-sensitive projects. They can get experts onboard on their projects while saving costs on internal hiring. When you choose the right service from these, you don’t have to:

• Lose opportunities to hiring time
• Pay more with an on-shore team
• Hire resources at different timezone
• Monitor teams separately
• Miss tapping into red-hot markets

So, let’s look at each of these individually so you can analyze which service works best for your business.

What is Staff Augmentation?

Imagine your company has a project to launch a new software development product shortly. Even though there is an incredible team, you still don’t have developers with specific skills for this project. That is precisely the time when you should try staff augmentation.  

Staff augmentation is an out-tasking model of hiring additional employees for a project. It is an effective way to enable your team to focus on more sensitive tasks while giving other operations to offshore experts. You can hire business analysts, developers, testers, or any professional with the service.

It is to augment your team’s capacity or reduce your workforce. A staff augmentation contract is a short-term solution for the project’s implementation period. 

We understand the importance of staff augmentation agencies for firms with resource shortages and thus came up with Strategic Staff Augmentation Framework 2.0, a book demonstrating a completely new approach toward staff augmentation. It’s a new and innovative way to get external resources to work for you while eliminating hidden costs.

Let’s have a look at some benefits of considering staff augmentation:

• It will cost you far less to scale up their team through staff augmentation than hiring new employees for the company.
• You can quickly add more resources if there’s a requirement at any project stage.
• Organizations can quickly access a vast talent pool of highly skilled developers, designers, project managers, and more, according to their requirements.
• Staff augmentation can help to decrease managerial issues as you’ll be working with a smaller staff.
• It can help you meet strict deadlines for your projects.

What are Managed Services?

While many consider hiring temporary staff to handle specific project activities, others look beyond the initial savings and expect to gain the long-term benefits of a solutions partner through managed services.

With Salesforce managed services, you can get end-to-end technology services and hire Salesforce developers to keep your systems running smoothly.

Managed services free you from tasks that usually require manual work. It allows you to focus on the right resources while keeping your strategic initiatives on track.

Here are some benefits of considering managed services:

• You can utilize managed services as a long-term solution to take advantage of the lower costs overall.
• Outsourcing to a managed services provider gives you the peace of mind that there will always be experts keeping an eye on and providing constant monitoring.
• The services manage the entire process from start to finish, taking care of the tools and resources necessary for successful execution.
• Managed services help calculate all the risks and prepare all project stages. 

Managed Services vs. Staff Augmentation: Which One to Choose

So, the real question is, which outsourcing model would work for your business? Considering your industries, Salesforce expertise, team sizes, project types, and team structures, you must evaluate yourself. Since these outsourcing methods are poles apart, it’s easy to determine which is best.

Organizations that need a short-term solution immediately need the talent to come on board and fill the gaps and should opt for staff augmentation. The flexibility and cost efficiencies they’re looking for will only be obtained through this method.

On the other hand, managed service is a better option for businesses looking to outsource their entire projects. Managed services give them peace of mind because they’ll have a dedicated team looking after their project. You can hire Salesforce developers which will make IT outsourcing costs predictable and saves them money in the long run.

Although you can choose any method, you need to remember that some decisions are easier to make while some can be highly subjective and need more emphasis to ensure they will work for a growing business. That’s where going for a custom model of outsourcing will work that will scale best for your business.

Most importantly, whichever service you need, you must connect with a reliable Salesforce partner. Hiring a certified Salesforce professional would help you as they can understand your business model to suggest and deliver just the right service for your business. 

Managed Services vs. Staff Augmentation: Make the Right Choice

When business needs are growing, it is necessary to distribute tasks in which they might face the difficulty of insufficient human resources and capabilities. There is always a choice between managed services vs. staff augmentation; you just need to know your best service.

Whichever option you choose, you need an expert to handle it all. Analyze your resource requirements and contact us to know how we can serve you in both ways.