If you are thinking about supplementing your staff with IT contractors, you are not alone.  Why?  It makes good financial sense.  Contractors are more economical than full-time employees because of the fact that they are paid on an hourly basis, and require no benefits.  However, there is some risk associated with staff augmentation if it is not done correctly. So, as a business owner who is attempting to improve your business processes as economically efficient as possible, how do you go about determining which jobs to keep in house and which to use contractors for? 

Some of the things to consider are:

• The employees that you have today
• Your IT project prioritization
• Your internal culture

For example, if you have excellent Project Managers or Team Leaders on your internal staff, you can consider contractors for the specific, task-oriented skills where you may not currently have coverage -- like programming or application development.  Here, you would hire a programmer or application developer and your internal resource would take care of project and resource management.  This would ensure that the right resource is working on the correct task and increase project success in an efficient manner.

It may be that you are trying to get a new system implemented and you don’t have the expertise to manage all of the tasks internally.  In this case, you may want to either outsource the entire project to a firm who can do it for you, or hire a project team on a contract basis to work with the staff on hand who understands the end goal that you are trying to accomplish.  Here, the project team would manage the implementation, and your staff would be involved as subject matter experts (from a company needs perspective).  This helps to ensure that the implementation is done correctly (using contracted expertise) and that your internal organization has buy-in since they have been involved along the way.

Perhaps the most important element of deciding when to use IT Staff Augmentation is your internal culture.  Every company has a it’s own unique corporate culture and when introducing new employees into your organization, it is important to ensure that they’ll fit correctly.  To facilitate contractors’ seamless integration into your environment, work with a good IT Staffing firm that takes this into consideration.  Any good staffing firm has a clear understanding of this and will question you on your culture to get a feel for the type of person that will fit into it most easily.  When done correctly, you will have contractors that work well within your corporate environment and who become a solid part of your team during their term of employment.

The companies that we work with from an IT Staff Augmentation perspective use IT contractors extremely successfully when they consider these three points.  When done correctly, using contractors can save you time and money and can allow you to get projects completed efficiently.