The terms “staff augmentation” and “dedicated team” are commonly used interchangeably in many sales pitches; however, the models address different needs, so choosing the wrong one not only means spending additional money, but may mean losing time due to incompatible delivery structure.
Staff augmentation: capacity on your terms
Staff augmentation involves hiring individual engineers as extensions of your existing team working under your existing management according to your existing processes. You are not hiring a team, you are hiring capacity which reports to your management and integrates into your sprint cycles in the same manner as an internal hire would.
This model makes sense in cases when:
- You have solid internal technical management, but need more people
- You have highly integrated system with little or no documentation available outside of your core team
- You require very targeted and specific skill sets for a particular period on the roadmap
- Ability to ramp up or ramp down people very quickly without having to restructure an entire team
Dedicated teams: a fully formed delivery team
The dedicated team is a fully formed delivery team, comprising engineers, delivery manager, and usually QA, responsible for an entire scope in a cohesive fashion. The team holds its own standup, sprint planning, and tracks progress against milestones rather than assigning tasks.
The model is best suited when:
- You are creating a new product line
- You don’t have enough capacity in your internal management team to lead new hires
- You require deliverables against a defined roadmap, not just more people
- The team is ready to hit the ground running due to their experience in delivering projects as a cohesive team
The decision criteria that really matter
Just ask yourself, who is going to plan the next two sprints of the work? Is it “our engineering leads, just needs more people to execute”? That’s augmentation. “We need someone to own that planning because we do not have the bandwidth”? Then that’s ownership.
Mismanaging the ratio is expensive
Augmenting a team that needs ownership just brings more bodies and nothing else, while your leads manage even more people with the same amount of time. Entrusting a dedicated team with a task that needed very close internal coordination adds an additional layer of communications where you did not need any.
The good news is you rarely have to make that decision once and forever. Most growing engineering organizations manage both types of teams at the same time, on different parts of their roadmaps.
