Staff Augmentation and End-to-End IT Services: What’s the Difference?
It’s no secret that Australia has a major and ongoing skills shortage when it comes to the IT sector. I wrote about this back in 2018, and the problem certainly isn’t going away any time soon.
Research reveals that while 9 in 10 employers struggle to get the skilled workers they need; 15% of companies have no plan in place to fill their skill gaps*. Now that our international borders have opened up again, we are seeing an increase in skilled migrated workers, but the overall numbers are still not where they need to be to fill gaps in the market.
The AFR has recently quoted Labor Senator Raff Ciccone as saying “I think there’s been a tendency over the last decade just to say, ‘well, we’ll just bring more people in from overseas to fill the labour shortage gap’. It is not sustainable, I think in the medium to long term, to continue to fill the gaps just with migration.”
As Australian businesses continue to struggle to fill important roles, Brennan offers businesses an easy way to eliminate the increasing demands on their IT teams via end-to-end IT services and staff augmentation. However, many organisations aren’t familiar with the difference between the two, nor which option is right for them. So, here’s a quick overview.
End-to-End IT Services
Essentially, this is where our expert team at Brennan IT manages your IT for you on a day-to-day basis and provides ongoing strategic guidance and insight. As your outsourced IT team, we can assume management of a raft of things – including IT security, cloud services, end user support or backup and recovery. We can also provide assistance when it comes to implementing new systems, IT-related processes or infrastructure, if you want to migrate workloads to the cloud, or if you want to assess and optimise your security and compliance.
Defining features of our end-to-end IT services include:
- Off-site: Our team works from our premises (or remotely) which means you don’t need to provide them with any desk space or special access.
- Scope: We agree to a pre-defined scope of work, and we invoice you for a fixed number of support hours (and an associated cost) per month.
- Service: We also put a detailed Service Level Agreement in place at the start of our relationship, so you have the peace of mind of knowing we’ll always deliver against our objectives.
Staff Augmentation
By contrast, this option is where we provide you with specific people to augment your in-house team on a contract basis. Typically, we recommend this as a temporary solution to short-term skills gaps – for instance, if you need your in-house team to be focused entirely on a particular project, yet don’t have the budget to increase your headcount for other work.
With this service, we offer highly skilled workers who can operate independently and function seamlessly as part of your existing team. We also provide them with the security of a long-term employment contract with us, and the ongoing training and education they need to keep their skills constantly up to date. Plus, we always vet all our contract staff thoroughly before assigning them to any project, and never employ anyone who we wouldn’t happily have working in our own office.
Defining features of our staff augmentation service include:
- On-site: Our people typically work from your office (or remotely, if you prefer), and as an intrinsic part of your team.
- Scope: We provide a team of people to you for a fixed monthly cost, and there is no real limit to the type or scope of work they do – that’s up to you.
- Scalability: The great thing about staff augmentation is that it enables you to be highly flexible. In the event that you don’t have approval to increase headcount, or if you need specific skills for an upcoming project, you can engage us to ‘fill the gap’. We can provide proven, tested and highly skilled consultants for anywhere from two weeks to three years, with no scope restrictions in their day-to-day duties. Then, if, and when your needs change, you can scale down, or up.
- Minimal risk: We manage and administer all our consultants in conjunction with you, thus reducing your HR burden. We also cover payroll tax and all insurance costs, and if an employee does happen to leave, it’s our responsibility to replace that person immediately to ensure there is no downtime.
Does it have to be an ‘either or’ scenario?
Absolutely not! End-to-end IT services and staff augmentation are not mutually exclusive options, and you can certainly utilise both as part of our managed services.
For example, if a business wanted to move some of its workloads to the cloud at the same time as it was going through a merger or acquisition, they might choose our end-to-end IT services for their cloud transition and ongoing management of this, and then use our staff augmentation service for the systems consolidation piece – which relies on having extensive in-house IP.
This said, not every business is ready for staff augmentation. We find it’s best for businesses that have robust systems and processes in place already, but who simply need extra help to complete tasks within a specific timeframe.
Want to know more?
If you want to learn more about our end-to-end IT services, or our staff augmentation services – and the approach that’s right for your business – please get in touch.
About Brennan IT
Brennan IT has an exceptional track record in delivering managed service excellence to organisations of all sizes. This is reaffirmed by our world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS) rating of 80+ received from our clients, and the fact we were awarded Homegrown Service Provider at ARN’s Innovation Awards for the development of our Self-Service portal – a unified, user-friendly platform that makes IT management easier, and provides greater visibility on the status and level of service being provided in real-time across networking, security, end-user infrastructure and more.