The concept of Team augmentation
Like many other terms in our field, the term team augmentation should be used more often. In the following essay, I will clarify some of the misconceptions that the term is concealing and how it differs from other external support options development teams have.
Team augmentation is an outsourcing strategy used to bring external expertise to a project and respond to the business objectives in ways that the company cannot. The technique consists of evaluating the existing team, and based on the company's current needs, determining the required solutions and the additional skills necessary to implement those solutions.
What does “team augmentation” mean for us?
Most of the time, team augmentation begins with requesting capabilities that the current team does not possess. We usually send one or two senior consultants; they learn about the current situation and figure out how we can help the customer find solutions fast. Furthermore, we give the team a good handover and knowledge transfer when we finish our work.
A common mistake is to believe that team augmentation is expensive because the company will lose the knowledge, and it’s better to put effort into growing the team internally. In the following paragraphs, I will explain why the notion is error-prone and why team augmentation can save your team money and resources.
What makes us different from other workforce suppliers?
We deal with DevOps every day and constantly perfect our craft. The collective knowledge and camaraderie in Polar Squad are huge success factors: one can tap into such a fountain of shared knowledge. When you work for a company like Polar Squad, you live and breathe DevOps.
Polar Squad is now part of Sevendos. We are seven companies, each being an expert in a specific field. But together, we can leverage our unique knowledge to create something massively significant. For example, Polar Squad is a DevOps consultancy: we are experts in the cloud-native world, specializing in making developers’ lives easier and more efficient. Our partners Wunderdog are a software consultation agency for full-stack development. We share the same working culture, but our expertise is different.
Our consultants do not blindly execute. Based on their expertise and experience with a broad range of companies, they know the usual pitfalls around software development and cloud engineering. If you ask them to work on a project that is doomed to fail, contains some mistakes, or where the desired solution will not solve the intended initial problem, they will raise their voice to help you, explain the situation, and provide a better solution.
Not only that, but if they need help finding a solution, they can rely on our internal network of expert consultants to find it, so our entire company always supports our consultants. Those experts are extremely hard to find in the market, let alone hire them full-time. Our unique culture helps us find people who are great team players and out-of-the-box thinkers.
What signs might show that I need support from an external consultancy like Polar Squad?
One pattern we often see: at some point, many companies find themselves in a situation where most of their tech team are soon leaving. They got a better offer, or the work is made of too many mundane tasks. They have decided to move to another company. The demand for good developers and infrastructure engineers is growing; it makes sense that people will eventually leave.
Another pattern we have seen is that teams don’t have the time to improve their stack; they put all their effort into fixing problems. Teams operating in this fashion will likely have low morale and lack knowledge about new technologies.
The sum of all these patterns might mean that your team can’t get into a situation where they have the capacity or expertise to start a new project or improve the current technologies. This situation might put your business at risk.
Bringing external experts who understand the subject matter can boost your team's productivity or even hand over a finished project with good knowledge transfer.
Why should I think about working with external companies like Polar Squad?
You might have a big project coming soon but need more resources to implement it.
You might have a specific bottleneck derived from some technical debt, but due to the above constraints, you don’t have anyone to solve the problem, or the people you have are too busy to work on a solution.
Your team might need some senior people, and finding one that would fit your needs takes time. Finding good senior technical experts is hard, especially if you need to work on methodologies and technologies you don’t know much about. Many companies want to modernize their stack with new tools such as Kubernetes. Setting up a simple pilot with it is easy, but making it a production-ready multi-tenant platform is not. External support can bring a lot of value you may not have in-house.
You need one person to lead and mentor the teams in new technologies or agile methodologies. Team augmentation can bridge the gap, and your team can gain the missing knowledge in a couple of months.
When you need fast results, you can call experts on the subject matter and let them use their experience and knowledge to save you from following all the mistakes everyone will make from day one.
What are the pillars of a successful team augmentation?
First, finding the right people is more than ticking checkboxes with some buzzwords and years of seniority. The priority is that the consultant supporting your team should fit your culture.
Second, creating trust between both parties. We can give our customers honest feedback about their situation, and they can provide us with honest feedback about our work and performance. We did many projects that took some time, but at some point, the customer understood that we were not there to hurt their feelings; we were there to help them. The best thing is that both sides grow together.
Do you have any more questions? We can help you! Polar Squad is a DevOps consultancy. Based in Helsinki, Berlin, Málaga, and Tampere, Polar Squad’s 50+ specialized senior professionals enable software development companies to focus on what matters. We are experts in DevOps, SRE, and cloud-native and are now even stronger with the support of Sevendos.