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With great advancements in technology, more and more organizations are relying on technological solutions to solve complex problems. However, there is still a shortage of IT talent and hence, many complexities remain unresolved. As per Gartner’s prediction, about 75% of the businesses will be facing disruptions in infrastructure & operations due to shortage in technological skills by 2020. Overall, the context of doing business has become all the more complex due to multiple locations, overseas offices, short-term projects and highly specialized skill requirements.

What are the problems faced in the overall recruitment process?

Old recruitment agencies
Retention problems
Balance between speed and quality
Resources are limited
Balance between the new and traditional
Competition

Whether you are a startup looking to make your business more public or a big organization wanting to spread your business overseas, Staff Augmentation can help. How? This is something that we are going to see in this article. Here, we will be mentioning about the benefits of hiring the staff augmentation service provider, why it is necessary and how can you choose the best service provider? If you are keen in knowing about the complete process, then please continue reading ahead.

What is Staff Augmentation?

To speak about it in simple words, Staff augmentation is a flexible outsourcing strategy that enables the business people to hire tech talent globally & manage the augmented team directly. The vendors help you to hire the skilled and well-trained professionals for your project/task. You get the authority to choose from the list of candidates provided by the staff augmentation agency. So, you do not have to worry about hiring the right resources for your organization as the staff augmentation company will that for you.

So, what do you need help with?

Staff augmentation helps you find the right IT talent needed for your specific business task or project. Your service provider manages everything, right from recruitment, training & communication, but they communicate directly with your team for tighter agility and alignment.

When you are in search of a good staff augmentation partner for your business, you must start with outlining your goals: do I need support with a specific project? Do i need to meet the ongoing staffing challenges, or solutions in the given market? What kind of expertise, skills & projects do you need help with? Staff augmentation can help you with everything from hardware to the data backup & recovery, consulting and application support. By analysing your different needs and requirements, you will be able to look for a service provider who will be able to fulfill your specific requirements.

Now, when choosing a Staff augmentation service provider for your business, there are certain points that you need to consider:

The nature and type of your project
The current schedule & availability of the IT staff and
The technical details of your project

There are some other points that we must understand in detail:

Type of expertise and talent required: While there are many staffing firms out there in the market who offer a varied range of talents they can provide, it is always smart to go for an organization that specializes in a specific type of talent. Focusing on a particular industry hones a staffing organization’s ability to discern the deeper requirements of the companies in that niche and select the best individuals that fit the criteria. This removes job mismatch and the hassle of replacing them with someone more fit for the role.

For instance, if you are looking for individuals with technical expertise, it is always a great idea to look for renowned and reputed IT staffing agencies since they know best what IT individuals must be like in terms of required expertise and skills.

Transparency: The primary requirement for a strong relationship between you and the staff augmentation partner is based on absolute transparency and clear communication. It means that the staffing agency should be able to provide you with a well-defined documentation on what its exact role is and a complete transparent break-down of costs.

They should also be able to reply to your questions in such a way that they clear all your doubts on a high-level with minimal knowledge of existing hiring processes. This helps engender trust & set realistic expectations.

Are their contracts one-size-fits-all?: Organizations usually find that the staff augmentation providers have a single approach towards doing business. Every deal follows just one specific template, and one-size-fits-all types of solutions. Yet, the reality is that every organization, every project and every job requisition is very unique. Look for a solutions provider that is willing to get creative, deliver what you need and develop a customized scope of work. In most of the cases, a one-size-fits-all solution is not going to offer you the results, flexibility, or savings that make staff augmentation attractive in the first place. The right kind of provider will work with you, your immediate requirements, and then support you as the business grows and your requirements evolve.

Add-on Solutions: Every staff augmentation service provider has a unique set of value-added services that they provide as an add-on or as part of their standard package. These solutions may include, providing specialized training to the recruits processed or conducting skills testing prior to onboarding.

It is crucial to check for these solutions to maximize the advantage your company gets from your staff augmentation partner.

Will they be able to meet your deadlines: You must also make sure that the staff augmentation agencies you talk with can meet your given timelines. How fast & agile is their execution? Waiting 60 days to fill a primary role, for example, is just not cost effective. Staff augmentation must enable you to move your projects forward quickly. There are many ways to evaluate. What does their network look like? How long do they quote a resolution? How are they into handling internal discussions around process changes or new business opportunities? Does the speed of communication at this stage reflect the speed you require? Choose efficient, customer-focused and agile partner that delivers results at the speed your company’s demands.

Conclusion

You must hire an agency or a firm that is able to meet the requirements and needs of your business with the right kind of resources and talent.

You must select a service provider that can help you overcome the disadvantages of the staff augmentation model. A great service provider can give you access to many of the skill sets and flexible workers who stay true with the contract.

They must also be able to provide project management services. They must also have a proper platform for communication between you and the augmented staff.

Make sure to read the reviews provided and check the ratings on renowned platforms like Glassdoor, Clutch and SoftwarFirms before hiring any Staff augmentation service provider. This way you will get to know more about them and won’t face any problem in the future.

If you have any queries or suggestions, please feel free to mention them below in the comment box. We will be happy to discuss them with you.

Devops-Bridge between Development and operations

What is DevOps?

DevOps is defined as a set of processes that merges both software development and operations. DevOps reduces the time required for delivering a software product with good quality. It uses tools of CI/CD(Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) to deliver a good quality software product. The usage of these tools makes the organisation provide a software product in less duration. They can serve the customers in a better way by solving post-delivery problems(problems which occur after delivering the software f product). Every phase of the software development life cycle is handled in a better way compared to the traditional software development process.

Why DevOps?

Now let us see why many companies are shifting their focus on DevOps. To understand this, first, we should know how software is developed before DevOps came into the market. The following steps explain the process of software development:

1) Identifying the problems: In this phase of SDLC(Software development life cycle) inputs are gathered from stakeholders, customers, industry experts and some programmers. By these inputs, we can know the positives and negatives of the current system, and we can obtain a goal for developing the software.

2) Planning: After fixing the goal, we should develop the best plan to achieve that goal. In this phase, the team will gather the requirements and determines the budget of the software product. It also identifies the risks involved and provides the steps to be taken for reducing those risks. For all these activities, a document known as SRS(Software Requirement Specification) is created.

3) Designing: In this phase, software requirements are converted into a design plan. All the stakeholders who are involved in software development will review the design, and they will give their inputs if necessary. It is essential to gather the inputs from stakeholders regarding the design plan, because failure at this stage may lead to the collapse of the entire project.

4) Developing: In this phase of SDLC, the software is developed by generating the required code. After the successful generation of code, an executable file comes as an output from this phase

5) Testing: After developing the software, it is tested to fix the error or bugs present in that software. Software is tested until it meets the required quality measures.

6) Deployment: After testing the software, it is deployed to limited users.Depending on the feedback from that user’s adjustments are done.

7) Maintenance: After releasing it to the customers, maintenance of the software comes into the picture. Support of software is related to releasing updates of the software, making end-users aware of the features of the software.

The above phases of the SDLC(Software Development Life cycle) describe how software is developed before the invention of DevOps. These steps tell us how every activity of software development is carried out separately. But DevOps combines the development and operations of the software product. Before the DevOps software development team and software testing team is separate, but DevOps combines them, and this improves the collaboration between them.

DevOps combines the development and operations team to solve post-delivery problems. Once the software is delivered to the customer, developers are least bothered about it. After product delivery customers or end-users will communicate with the operations team of the organization. The operations team cannot answer the modifications or defects raised by the customers. This leads to the involvement of the developer in the post-delivery phase. So, DevOps combines these two teams, so that they can serve the end-user in a better way,

How DevOps Works?

In the above section, we discussed that DevOps combines both development team and testing team, let us see how it works. DevOps has many aspects, but the following capabilities make it working successfully, they are:

Collaboration: Instead of rising fingers at each other, development and IT operations team work together. Due to this collaboration, the stake of each team in software development is increased. This leads everyone to work efficiently during the software development process. Not only development and operations teams but all teams, including testing, product management are also combined.

Continuous integration: As DevOps is developed from an Agile environment, we can find continuous integration in the DevOps Environment. Continuous integration merges the source code updates continuously from all the members of the developing team. This integration reduces code conflicts.

Automation: DevOps depends heavily on the tools. DevOps depends on toolchains to automate a larger chunk of the end-to-end software development.

Continuous Testing: In DevOps, testing is not limited to QA team. It starts in the development phase. Developers will define test sets along with quality code. QA team will configure the testing environment, and they will perform the testing activity on the given test sets. In continuous testing, the main objective is to speed up the testing process. Continuous testing will enhance the quality of the software product.

Continuous Delivery: In DevOps, another critical aspect is continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is achieved when changes in code are automatically built, tested and are prepared to deploy or release. Due to this, continuous delivery organizations can have multiple deployments per day. Continuous delivery will also improve the quality of the product.

Continuous Monitoring: In DevOps continuous monitoring team will monitor the software product to identify the root cause of the errors. Continuous monitoring starts in the development phase. The tools which are used in the development phase monitors the product to rectify the mistakes before it goes into the production environment.

Benefits from DevOps

Organizations who have adopted DevOps are gaining the following benefits:

1)Stability: High performing organizations are spending less time on rework; they are spending more time on new work like adding new features to the product.

2)Security: Organizations are spending less time on resolving their security issues.

3)Deployment Speed: High performing organizations have multiple deployments in a day.

Conclusion

Almost after ten years of DevOps invention, we can say that it is a revolution in the software development process. It is a revolution because it has combined every aspect of the software development process into a single workflow which has a common goal of meeting customer requirements. Software developers and system administrators stopped fighting, and they started supporting each other. Business managers are happy as they are able to meet the quality standards. Because of these gains, Devops is ruling the software industry.