With the ultra high growth of the IT sector in the recent years, companies are finding it to be a major challenge to fulfill their outsourcing needs and yet maintaining sustainable profits. Companies and businesses face a constant need to increase their manpower from time to time but increasing personnel is quite a costly and time-consuming affair. It is at this point when the various outsourcing and managed services knock the door to solve all your hiring or outsourcing needs.
For all those companies and businesses who are thinking of expanding their work-operations, there is a wide range of services to choose from. Some of the most common services that can be opted include: staff augmentation and managed services. Well! Though both of these are two separate models of outsourcing, it can be difficult at times to decide which one to go for.
Before taking your decision, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the application and usability of both and analyzing the merits and de-merits of both the models.
In the most simple terms, while the staff augmentationoffers you to extend your staffing by hiring temporary employees for your ongoing work projects; managed services model allows organizations to grow without hiring additional employees.
Staff augmentation can prove to be helpful for the short-term completion of specific work projects by temporarily assignment of the work projects as and when the need arises. Some of the advantages of this approach can be that by getting your work done from the hired personnel, your organization can retain the ability to control all its resources. It generally carries low-risk as no long term commitments or investments are involved. Because through staff augmentation, resources are hired for a short-term, so there is not much internal resistance and also, no large contract structures need to be created. Overall, staff augmentation is quite a simple, quick and effective means for fulfilling your temporary work requirements at sustainable costs. It is a means of filling in the support-deficiencies.
Managed services, on the other hand, is an outsourcing model in which the clients outsource their overall management and operation of the support systems to some external vendors. Managed services, also known as the third-party managed services, can help in relieving many of the clients burdens. Such vendors take over the entire tasks of management, supervision and maintenance of the overall organizations project without adding to your staffing. These vendors usually experience the economies of scale due to which they can provide services at much cheaper rates. It becomes the responsibility of the vendor to maintain the required and expertise pool of employees for all your companys projects and operations. And above all, the liability of the clients company gets reduced and it remains no more solely responsible for maintaining its service levels.
In a nutshell, the most basic difference between these two models is that while staff augmentation is committed to provide you with an input, the managed services model strives to deliver you an outcome.