When it comes to delegating some tasks to third-party specialists, businesses can consider two possible options: hire individual experts with the necessary skills or staff a full-fledged team. Below, we will look at each of them in detail to provide you with a complete understanding of which option is best for you.

How to Choose the Right Collaboration Model

In general, the idea of transferring tasks to a remote contractor is not new. Its evolution came with the popularization of software solutions for remote interaction, and reached a new stage during the COVID-19 pandemic when it became almost the only possible way to maintain the same pace of business processes in a company.

However, the need to hire a full-fledged dedicated team does not always exist: it is likely that your internal specialists may be sufficient to perform the vast majority of existing tasks, and you may simply need a separate expert with a certain set of competencies to cover a specific need within a limited period of time. This is where command augmentation can come to the rescue.

In particular, you simply tell the dedicated software development team you hired the tasks you are going to delegate, and your contractor covers your needs in a few days, selecting the right specialist from his talent pool.

To break down the differences between these two types of remote collaboration even more clearly, let's look at them using a number of comparative criteria below:

• Collection of project requirements and documentation. Quite often, the hiring of dedicated teams is triggered by the fact that the company’s local staff has no IT specialists at all, and the core area in which it operates uses digital solutions only as an auxiliary tool. In this regard, the managers of this company may not have an understanding of what the architecture of the future solution should be, what functionality is mandatory and what is secondary, what technologies make sense to use, etc. In this regard, the choice of all these aspects is quite logical on the shoulders of dedicated software development teams. Conversely, hiring one or more individual remote specialists implies that the company already has its own technology stack and its own technical vision for the project, and all that augmented employees need to do is simply fulfill the obligations assigned to them.

• Distribution of tasks and management of work processes. Dedicated software developers are most often managed on the side of the company that provides them, although of course the customer always has the opportunity to take on this responsibility. In the same way, the distribution of tasks is carried out within this team. As for augmented specialists, they follow the regulations adopted in the customer’s team (and company) and perform tasks that are assigned to them by the person responsible for this in this team.

• Salary. While dedicated software development teams are paid according to the pre-agreed rates of each of its members, in the case of augmented experts this aspect can be more flexible. In particular, in the second case, payment options for completing a specific task (without taking into account the time spent on it), as well as payment according to the Time and Materials model, can also be considered.

So, What’s The Next?

Now, you can make a justified decision in favor of one or another cooperation model. At the same time, whichever option you choose from these two – dedicated software team or augmentation – you can always be sure that we will cope with your task best of all.