Team management (8 mins read ) - Published on July, 2023

In the current global market the development of technology and software platforms has become critical for companies to stay competitive, drive innovation and deliver the highest possible value to an increasingly demanding customer base.

As these types of projects continue to become more complex, requiring different types of emerging technologies and specific domains of knowledge and usually having tight timelines, balancing them with existing business demands can become very difficult to many companies.

So,what’s the best way to approach these challenges? One smart way is to extend your software team in order to meet your productivity and timeline requirements.  In this article, we’ll explore the different scenarios in which you can expand your software team and the pros and cons of each one so you can determine which one better suits your current company needs. 

Why consider a team extension for your business? 

Having a team extension is when you add new team members from outside your organization to your in-house team, these new team members integrate into your team and adhere to your current processes, these new team members may be from an outsourcing organization or may be freelancers depending on your situation.

Onboarding new team members has many benefits like increasing your project velocity, reducing employee burnout, bringing specialized expertise, adding a new fresh perspective, having complementary knowledge and skills to help you enhance your process standards and product quality, among others. So, what’s the best way to extend my team?. Let’s see the options with the pros and cons.

Ways to Extend Your Software Development Team

Onboarding more in-house developers 

One common way to extend your team is just hiring more full-time employees. These new employees will embrace your company vision and culture, it is a long-term commitment and a way to build a stable production capacity. 

Pros of In-house hiring

• Enhanced collaboration: The sense of belonging is heightened, promoting closer collaboration among developers. 
• Strengthening internal processes: Standardized processes facilitate effective problem-solving and long-term improvements. 
• Alignment with company culture and vision: It may be easier to have employees to embrace the company vision, values and culture.
• Predictability: You usually have more predictability in terms of the expected output of each full time team member.

Cons of In-house hiring

• Recruitment and training timeline: Recruiting a specialized professional is hard and time consuming, this is often hard to balance with existing business requirements.
• Recruitment and training expenses: Hiring, onboarding and training full-time developers is costly. 
• Fixed Costs Growth: Adding employees means increasing your fixed expenses based on salaries, benefits, operation costs and taxes. 
• Limited Flexibility: FT employees lack the flexibility of just working temporarily for X hours until completing a project or part of it.
• Potential issues with termination: If you need to terminate an employee due to low performance you may be posed under a difficult situation.

Hiring freelancers and contractors

Another way to expand your team is by hiring freelancers or external contractors to work alongside your in-house staff, this may be a savvy move when you have short term projects or need some extra hands when in a high demand season. 

Pros of Hiring freelancers

• Quick hiring: Hiring a freelancer is usually faster than hiring a full time employee which sometimes is key to meet established timelines.
• Flexibility: Freelancers and contractors can bring the extra hands needed for seasons without requiring a long term commitment on your part.
• Budget- friendly: Hiring freelancers is usually cheaper than hiring full time employees who have a cost associated with salaries, benefits, office costs and taxes. 
• Wide Expertise: Freelancers usually have a wide range of skills and experience due to their exposure to multiple types of clients, this may be particularly beneficial for tackling certain types of projects.

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Cons of Hiring freelancers 

• Performance concerns: Due to the nature of their work freelancers are usually engaged in multiple projects at once, this may be an obstacle if you need someone performing at their 100% to get critical work across the line as fast as possible.
• Communication hurdles: Working with people in other parts of the world may pose collaboration issues due to cultural and time zone differences which can delay the completion of projects.
• Privacy concerns: Engaging freelancers may not be the best option for certain types of projects where data privacy is a critical matter.
• Operation reliability: Relying too heavily on freelancers may increase the risks on achieving business continuity, project completion timelines and meeting business goals.

To learn more about hiring freelancers vs hiring an outsourcing company you can check our article freelancer vs software company comparison here. 

Partnering with a Staff Augmentation Company 

Hiring personnel through a staff augmentation company is another feasible option in which you expedite the recruitment process, minimize hiring costs and get access to a global pool of candidates.

Pros of a Staff Augmentation Company 

• Quickly scaling up: You can quickly get started with a developer that otherwise may take months to find and lots of precious time from your daily business work.
• Elimination of additional recruitment expenses: such as hiring , taxes and benefits expenses.
• Enhanced focus on your core business: Frees up lots of time to be dedicated to improving internal processes, improving efficiency and productivity and meeting your most important goals. 
• Global pool access: By partnering with a staffing company you can get access to a pool of specialized professionals from different countries but still aligned with your timezone which multiplies your possibilities.

Cons of a Staff Augmentation Company 

• External provider dependence: Relying too much on a staff provider may increase the risks on your project if the hired personnel have performance or availability issues.
• Control and autonomy balance: Balancing autonomy with the degree of control that allows for effective project execution and delivery may not be an easy task and usually requires solid project management and communication processes in place.
• Integration and management hurdles: Integrating outsourced developers may come with cultural, time zone and communication roadblocks that require time to adapt to.  

Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

Another way to extend your software team is to hire a dedicated development team composed of specialized profiles to deliver specific projects while you keep running your current projects and operations.

Pros of a Dedicated team

• Core business focus: You keep focus on your core business functions as well as internal projects and operations, this approach is highly beneficial in being able to effectively delegate and get more accomplished faster.
• Access to specialized expertise: A dedicated team comes with multiple specialized skills that can help you expedite different technical tasks and projects.
• Boosted efficiency: A dedicated team boosts the efficiency and velocity of execution of your projects since the team is focused on getting the projects across the line and are not occupied in daily operations matters.
• Scalability and flexibility: This approach allows you to expand or shrink your team based on actual project needs which fits quite well the temporal nature of projects.

Cons of a Dedicated Team

• Less control: In many of these scenarios you may lose control over important technical decisions and lose project execution control to a certain level.
• Possible communication complexity: According to the nature of your project and your specific company situation you will need to establish communication processes to deal with technical and business matters.
• Challenges in knowledge transfer: Once the contract ends, there may be challenges in learning the important details about the product and transferring the acquired knowledge during the project’s execution to your internal team. 
• External provider dependence: In this scenario you are giving up a lot of the control over the day to day nuances of the work, if the team doesn’t perform at their best at any moment this may impact your project quality and timeline.

Hybrid Approach 

The hybrid approach is a way to complement your internal team with outsourced specialists, to many companies it can be a way of getting the best of the two worlds. 

Pros of Hybrid approach

• Scalability: You expand your team with the extra people based on your needs, once you get your company initiatives across the line you can scale down.
• Balancing Control and Flexibility: It’s a great way to balance the control you get from working with full time employees with the flexibility of having a few temporal specialists helping you with the heavy lifting of project work.
• Optimized expenses: You keep an internal team for ongoing operations and pay only for actual temporal extra work.
• Boosted productivity: You combine the domain expertise of your internal team with the industry specialized skills of the outsourced professionals which results in boosted technical capabilities and productivity.

Cons of Hybrid Approach

• Communication hurdles risk: Incorporating outsourced new team members may pose communication obstacles due to cultural and time zone differences.
• Dependence on external teams: Relying on external experts for certain types of tasks that are critical for the business may pose you under business continuity risks. 
• Potential increased management requirements: The incorporation of new team members usually comes with augmented communication and coordination needs which may be increased by outsourced team members.
• Data privacy concerns: Some types of projects may have stakeholders concerned with outsourced personnel having access to sensitive information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are multiple ways in which you can extend your software team, evaluating the pros and cons of hiring employees, hiring a staff augmentation company or engaging freelancers rests on you as an expert in your business, however, in the current hyper competitive digital world it is critical to move fast and to delight users with the highest possible value at the highest quality. 

At Scalant we have over a decade of experience in the software industry, building and managing teams that successfully build and deliver software products that delight users and drive innovation and business growth. If you’re interested in exploring the staff augmentation route don’t hesitate, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help you explore the different options for your software team strategy.

Thanks for reading!