Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services - Forte Group

Staff Augmentationvs. Managed ServicesHow to evaluate which software engagement models provide the highest-value outcomes at the lowest cost of ownership

W H I T E P A P E R

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Staff Augmentationvs. Managed ServicesHow to evaluate which software engagement models provide the highest-value outcomes at the lowest cost of ownership

W H I T E P A P E R

4 White Paper: Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed ServicesHow to evaluate which software engagement models provide the highest-value outcomes at the lowest cost of ownership

Evolution: Business solutions are increasingly found through technology, necessitating that companies pivot to become technology-centric organizations through digital transformation

Execution: Major platform-level shifts aren’t easy to achieve, but the costs (and opportunity costs) of not addressing heavy technical debt will grow exponentially for companies that delay the shift

Acceleration: New and rapid technology advancements can drive businesses forward, but only those that keep pace with the leaders will maintain or achieve competitive advantage

Agility: Stable consumer demand can no longer be assumed. To be successful, companies must align to focus on their customers’ expectations, delivering what customers want, when they want it

Software delivery is moving faster than ever, thanks to improved processes and increased IT maturity. However, that’s not yet cause for a victory lap. Faster does not always equate to better. Of the IT executives surveyed in the 2018 ‘State of Agile Report,’ only 12 percent reported that their organization possessed a “high level of agile competency.”1

To solve the delivery dilemma, spending has skyrocketed. IT budgets are at their highest level since 2014.2 Everyone wants better delivery and have shown their willingness to pay for it. Still, acceleration presents challenges that budgets alone can’t resolve:

1.) 12th annual “State of Agile Report” (https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile)2.) TEKsystems “IT Forecast Survey” (https://www.teksystems.com/en/insights/press/2018/it-forecast-transformation)

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If you’re weighing the pros and cons of staff augmentation versus managed services, it’s likely that you’re among the 75 percent of IT leaders who are frustrated with the status quo.

These challenges place tremendous pressure on IT enterprises, including those who have made great strides in faster delivery. Even with increased IT spending, most organizations feel constrained, and lack the appropriate resources and well-defined processes to ensure that software solutions are delivered fast and delivered right.

Many mid- and large-sized IT enterprises rely on outsourcing or staff augmentation to achieve their goals. However, for those who are asked to justify their IT organization, demonstrate value, and constantly feel as though their efforts are not delivering, this white paper provides proven alternative approaches to better align IT organizations with the goals of their business.

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services: Weighing the Pros and Cons

If you’re weighing the pros and cons of staff augmentation versus managed services, it’s likely that you’re among the 75 percent of IT leaders who are frustrated with the status quo.

First, let’s look at the predominant engagement models organizations use to staff or manage their IT projects: staff augmentation, managed services, and a hybrid approach. Below, we evaluate the merits and potential drawbacks of each engagement model. Then, in the section that follows, we detail when we applied these three engagement models with a Chicago-based financial services organization.


Staff augmentation is a staffing model in which an organization partners with an outside firm when they need resources to round out or bolster their teams with outside expertise. The staff augmentation company recruits the employee, handling the hiring process, then embeds the employee within the client’s IT team. The staff augmentation company charges a fee (usually an hourly rate) for the employee.

IT enterprises often default to staff augmentation to accelerate delivery when internal resources are constrained. The assumption here is that internal product owners and team leads can manage the work of contracted, engineers to scale production. This approach gives organizations greater delivery control, but without clearly defined processes and a shared understanding of value and goals, projects can get off track quickly.

So when does staff augmentation work best? The list of pros and cons on the next page can help you decide.

Overview: Staff AugmentationAssessing the pros and cons of staff augmentation engagements

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Pros of Staff Augmentation

Cons of Staff Augmentation

Expertise: With staff augmentation, companies can hire the experts they need—skilled developers, quality assurance analysts, and other IT professionals—without the encumbrances of hiring, onboarding, and retaining an internal team.

Flexibility: The scope and requirements placed upon an IT team can scale or diminish rapidly. Staff augmentation gives organizations the flexibility to add or remove team members quickly. This makes staff augmentation a low-risk, fluid staffing option for organizations whose IT needs have a high level of variance.

Speed: It often takes months for HR departments to fill IT roles. Staff augmentation firms usually have a deep Rolodex of IT professionals, which helps organizations fill these roles with appropriately-skilled professionals quickly.

Control: In a staff augmentation model, the organization—not the staff augmentation firm—controls the product road map and delivery.

Goals are tied to talent, not to value: Since resources are paid at an hourly rate, goals are aligned to hours of work rather than value-based outcomes.

It’s not a long-term solution: There’s a general assumption that outsourcing and staff augmentation are cost-efficient. This assumption almost always ends up being incorrect. Over time, staff augmentation is a costly endeavor that requires higher labor costs when compared with hiring a full-time employee or managed services team.

The organization holds accountability: Since delivery is controlled in-house, the organization must accept responsibility for any successes or failures in delivery. This control can often be detrimental, as it comes with a greater risk to delivery: Augmented team members can only be as successful as the organization’s existing IT delivery system.

It maintains status quo rather than evolving the organization: Staff augmentation adds resources to an organization, but because placed team members are simply supplementing an existing team, their ability to elevate processes and delivery speed is limited.


Staff augmentation gives organizations greater delivery control, but without clearly defined processes and a shared understanding of value and goals, projects can get off track quickly.


Forte Group defines managed services when a company hires an outside, specialized technology vendor to manage all or some of its software development. In this model, the managed services team works with its client to define a product roadmap and accepts responsibility for delivery.

Where staff augmentation adds scale to whatever level of sophistication a team has achieved, managed services focuses on enhancing that level of sophistication. An accomplished managed services team aims to build a sustainable process that blends and integrates teams to generate more predictable, valuable outcomes through frequent software delivery cycles. The goals of staff augmentation tend to be linear: Make the next sprint; get the job done. The goals—and potential—of a managed services team is to get the job done, but while doing so, evolving practices to achieve greater organizational value as delivery processes mature with each delivery cycle.

So when does staff augmentation work best? The list of pros and cons on the next page can help you decide.

Overview: Managed ServicesAssessing the pros and cons of managed services engagements

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Pros of Managed Services

Pay for outcomes, not hours: Managed services pricing models are typically tied to value. Rather than paying for a set number of hours, pricing is based on sprints and product delivery through a service-level agreement (SLA).

Evolution: Because managed services teams are financially incentivized to deliver, the value of the software they produce is typically higher than that of their internal counterparts. The result is that the outside partner can improve processes through which software is built, leading to delivery systems that accelerate over time.

Focus: When employing a managed services partner, an organization can solely focus on defining and driving business value, rather than building and maintaining an IT department. Internal IT departments are then elevated to focus on business strategy versus software execution.

Sustainability: Because managed services teams focus on an improved set of processes, value to the organization increases with each delivery cycle. This evolves the organization, increasing the quality of output at a lower long-term cost than staff augmentation or outsourcing.


Vendor selection: Since a managed services model requires that IT services be consigned to a third-party company, the selection of the right partner is paramount to a product’s success.

Misaligned objectives: For managed services to be successful, the goals of the provider and the business must be aligned. Managed services providers that focus on systems and processes, rather than business objectives, should be avoided.

Less control: IT departments employing managed services must relinquish execution responsibilities to the provider, which requires a high level of trust.

Cons of Managed Services

Because managed services teams focus on an improved set of processes, value to the organization increases with each delivery cycle. This evolves the organization, increasing the quality of output at a lower long-term cost than staff augmentation or outsourcing.


Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services: What’s the Industry Doing?

Among technology executives surveyed in the “IT Forecast Survey ,” managed services held a slight advantage—52 percent of respondents expected an increase in spending for managed services, compared with a 48 percent expected increase for staff augmentation. This data suggests that both staff augmentation and managed services are well-utilized within the industry.

Staff augmentation clearly isn’t going away, but we’ve observed that, much like the technology landscape, the model is evolving. When used as the primary staffing model within complex IT organizations and projects, staff augmentation tends to drag organizations into the quagmire of frustration described earlier—slow delivery, buggy products, and IT processes that flatline rather than evolve. Staff augmentation is best used, instead, as a supplementary tool. When used in tandem with a managed services model, the accelerated delivery, higher value-driven outcomes, and greater technical agility, and lower total cost of ownership can be realized with the help of staff augmentation.

Mixed Engagement Models: Crafting the Ideal Recipe

Of the IT executives polled in the “IT Forecast Survey,” 37 percent listed “improving existing applications and infrastructure” as a top goal for 2019. This means that nearly half of IT companies want to improve their delivery processes. For these companies, staff augmentation is not an ideal fit. Staff augmentation doesn’t improve processes, it provides greater staffing resources to accelerate existing processes.

Since managed services partners are financially incentivized to consistently prove their worth, the engagement model tends to produce a higher-value outcome, particularly in the long-term. This makes managed services a better fit for those organizations looking to deliver greater value and improve their processes, applications, and infrastructure. This doesn’t preclude staff augmentation from being a viable engagement model, but independently, the model is not a catalyst for change.

Increase

Decrease

Stay the same

How do you expect your organization’s IT spending to change in 2019?

Staff augmentation

Managed services

Outsourcing

49% 52% 35%

15% 8% 14%

38% 40% 51%

Source: TEKsystems “IT Forecast Survey” https://www.teksystems.com/en/insights/press/2018/it-forecast-transformation

Mixed engagementsThe state of the industry, other options, and how staff augmentation and managed services can be used in tandem

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A full-service provider of solutions, services, and staff augmentation is best-equipped to provide the staffing approach that is the ideal fit to the engagement. Each engagement requires a unique recipe, and a blend of staffing options helps to ensure that the needed ingredients are on hand to craft a Goldilocks-esque solution.

This solution is often achieved with a hybrid of staff augmentation and managed services, which can provide the following benefits:

y Service continuity remains intact y Even with staffing fluctuations, delivery occurs at a sustainable pace y Smooth team transitions can occur when onboarding or

restructuring staff

The zenith of any managed services trajectory is an organizational partnership—all teams, regardless of model, become increasingly collaborative. As the teams become fused over time, they reach a heightened level of engineering maturity, shared understanding, and alignment. All players have skin in the game, are aligned on what’s valuable to the business and are focused on delivering it.

Is delivery working? Use staff augmentation to accelerate and scale that successful delivery.

Is delivery bumpy? Use a managed services provider to transition and evolve engineering maturity and practices.

Need to fill gaps? Create a hybrid augmentation-services model that increases maturity in tandem with accelerating delivery.

Are the right products being built, the right way? Buggy products that don’t produce organizational value are a symptom of deficient IT expertise, talent, or both. A managed services or hybrid augmentation-services model can improve these inefficiencies.

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services:Asking the Right Questions

When considering a blended managed services-augmentation partnership model, the following questions should be used to guide each engagement:

Managed services is a better fit for those organizations looking to deliver greater value while improving their processes, applications, and infrastructure

Which engagement model works best? The answer depends on the needs of the organization.


In an ideal world, many organizations would prefer to build their own in-house technology team. Doing so can be beneficial but requires significant up-front, overhead costs—not to mention time, depending on the size and complexity of the IT enterprise. Many IT enterprises that have tried to accomplish this on their own have encountered the following challenges:

An Alternative ApproachWhy not build a full-time, in-house IT team?

Finding TalentU.S. News and World Report ranks “software developer” as its top job for 2019 for good reason. Companies struggle to meet technology demands, and as a result, the need for skilled developers and engineers has never been higher. The result is a talent gap: Engineering talent is difficult and expensive to attract and retain, particularly for organizations that lack adequate technical maturity. Among the executives polled for the “IT Forecast Survey ,” 44 percent listed finding exceptional engineers as a struggle—the top response in the survey. A firm providing staff augmentation or managed services, on the other hand, can source engineering talent from all over the world. At Forte Group, we staff a team of more than 30 seasoned recruiters who have working relationships with hundreds of tech professionals and a deep understanding of the industry’s labor trends and skillsets.

Innovation DecayIf the team isn’t growing, it’s falling behind. In the ever-changing enterprise IT landscape, it’s essential to keep up-to-speed on the newest technologies, methodologies, and platforms. For an internal team, this necessitates hiring an experienced practice leadership to offer guidance, support, and training to the staff through career development and learning opportunities. Continued development of an IT staff is an added cost, but one that pays off with greater product quality and increased employee engagement. Companies that neglect this investment risk “innovation decay,” where teams fall behind the pace of industry advancement.

Time-to-ValueEven if an organization is willing to accept the financial costs of building an IT department, it’s important to note that assembling the team requires a significant investment of time. Hiring and onboarding an internal team usually takes months, which pushes back the kickoff and delivery timeline. That time-to-value is an important consideration when weighing an outside partner versus building an internal IT team: Building an organization can cost millions before an ounce of value is created. If assembling and onboarding a team takes three months or more, what’s the opportunity cost of that lost time?

VerdictEven if building a self-sustained internal IT team is an organization’s end goal, partnering with an outside firm can provide interim support. Managed services engagement models provide an on-ramp that supports an organization during its transition,

1.) 12th annual “State of Agile Report” (https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile)2.) TEKsystems “IT Forecast Survey” (https://www.teksystems.com/en/insights/press/2018/it-forecast-transformation)

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To illustrate how each staffing model can be beneficial in different situations, let’s look at a leading financial services company based in Chicago. We recently worked with the company using each of the three staffing and service models (staff augmentation, managed services, and hybrid augmentation-services) we’ve outlined thus far. The examples below provide an excellent example of how a diverse array of staffing options can offer a solution that provides the most value to organizations.

Case Study: One Size Does Not Fit AllHow a leading financial service company chose its engagement options

SummaryThe financial services client we worked with is a leader in risk and compliance solutions, providing insightful technology, industry expertise, and data insights to clients around the globe. With several product offerings, the organization helps its clients navigate complicated regulations with the help of technology.

After divesting from its parent company the financial services client wanted to radically morph into a technology-first, digitally transformed business. When a company divests, there’s often a reliance on some of the previous company’s legacy systems. For this company, the costs to maintain and pay licensing fees toward the legacy system became greater than the cost of creating a new system. Those costs, coupled with a need for a more modern system that could support an improved, omnichannel shopping experience prompted the need to act. The organization decided it was time to break from the legacy system and opted to build its own custom platform.

Challenge

Leaders at the organization knew they needed a custom platform and wanted to speed up their delivery but lacked the infrastructure and resources to make it happen. They decided they needed a partner to own the solution and brought in Forte Group.

The goal was to evolve into an organized, disciplined, and sophisticated IT shop. To reach this goal, the company’s leadership recognized that it needed a managed services partner.

Solution

The Forte managed services engagement began with an evaluation of the organization’s needs. The Forte team quickly set up shop, but on a relatively small scale. The managed services team was able to establish technology leadership: a detailed roadmap, improved engineering practices, frequent delivery, and metrics of success.

Quick look

y Client: Leading financial services company

y Type of work: Staff augmentation, managed services

y Industry: Financial services

y Technologies: .NET, SQL, C#, Azure Cloud, Angular, microservices architecture


Solution (cont.)First came process implementation and evolution. Steps included:

y Providing agile coaching: Forte helped provide the company’s IT team with the knowledge needed to build a technical roadmap and feature roadmap

y Using the roadmap as a guide, establishing a predictable cadence of delivery

y Building an automated testing platform into the delivery process, which helped identify and fix bugs much earlier in the development process

y Establishing a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, which allowed engineers to accelerate delivery

The result was an improved application that can support enhanced features. One such feature, built into the release, was an enhanced omnichannel cart experience, where users could add items to their cart on one device, then complete the purchase later on another device. Another was a “suggested items” feature, where the application makes a recommendation of add-on items that relate to a user’s browsing habits. These features helped to increase sales and provided an optimal customer experience across all devices.

Product A: Evolving IT Leadership with Managed Services

Forte began working on another of the organization’s products (which we’ll call “Product A”), this time in a managed services engagement. Product A is a highly secure data-room platform that helps Fortune 500 companies to confidently share critical information in real time.

The managed services teams began with an assessment, which asked, “what can we adopt?” and “what can we evolve?” Since the Product A team had a sophisticated deployment structure already in place, the managed services team adopted the company’s existing deployment strategy. The managed services team worked to evolve everything else—process, culture, the technologies used, and design strategy.

Within six months of the engagement, the Forte managed services team established a stable cadence of delivery. This fostered the creation of better product development processes: improved discipline, transparency, business flexibility, quality assurance, delivery, and ultimately, organizational buy-in.

Product A needed IT leadership, and the managed services team took that role until the internal team had the tools and techniques needed to take the reins. In the case of Product A, a managed services partner helped to fill gaps in delivery while establishing processes that injected greater maturity and expertise into the delivery process.

Product B: Accelerating Delivery with Staff Augmentation

The company’s leaders saw opportunity in accelerating another of the company’s products (which we’ll call “Product B”). Product B is a set of intuitive tools that help enterprises manage complex data and content to create and file high-quality, consistently stylized regulatory documents in the financial services industry.

The Product B team already had accomplished IT leadership, but it needed additional talent to build additional features faster. Since established practices were already in place, it was time to get to work accelerating rather than evolving—an evolution, in this case, wasn’t needed. Part of ‘adoption’ is recognizing when managed services is needed and when it’s not. For Product B, we agreed that staff augmentation was the best fit, as IT leadership, processes, and structure were already in place.

Through staff augmentation, our financial services client was able to scale teams and accelerate Product B’s delivery.

A

B

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Product C: Accelerating and Evolving with Managed services and Staff augmentation

The company’s leaders identified another product (which we’ll call “Product C”) that could benefit from managed services. Product C is an e-delivery and e-commerce platform that allows users to create and submit print and packaging jobs. The platform then fulfills the job through a network of printers.

Product C replaced a legacy system used by more than 30 large enterprise clients. Forte worked with the organization to build a new website from the ground up, integrated the new site into an AS/400 back-end, built the integration, they onboarded the organization’s largest client and took Product C live in less than one year. The minimum viable product (MVP) was achieved in just six months.

Product C’s leadership opted to augment its staff with an offshore team but wanted to retain the option of a local managed services team for support. In this “hybrid staff augmentation” model, we were able to provide design and engineering talent with components of the practice oversight the managed services “mothership” can offer. Even though the organization was building Product C under its own direction and process model, the support of a managed services hybrid model provided the benefits of talent placement and continuity behind the scenes.

OutcomeThree teams, all managed differently. Staff augmentation and managed services work in different scenarios. Product A was successful in evolving as a product line that required several cross-functional practices: engineering, quality assurance, testing, test automation, and DevOps. Product B just needed to scale faster and deliver more features. The first required practice leadership, the second just needed a shovel-ready team. For Product C, the company wanted to have both the benefits and flexibility and acceleration of staff augmentation while having the leadership of managed services in its arsenal.

As process and engineering maturity grew, the needs of each team evolved.

y Product A (managed services): With Product A, the organization wanted increasingly higher levels of maturity and automation. It continued to advance using a managed services model.

y Product B (staff augmentation): With Product B, the organization knew exactly what it wanted to build, but needed well-equipped, talented teams to accelerate delivery. It chose a staff augmentation model.

y Product C (managed-augmented hybrid): With Product C, the organization wanted the maturity a managed services partner can offer, but to scale production, it chose a staff augmentation model. Complimenting managed services, the Product C team was able to draw from the well of staff augmentation resources with point-level experts—UX designers, quality assurance analysts, DevOps engineers, among others—to support the needs of understaffed practices.

In many organizations, business development and IT departments are at odds. Both share different goals and areas of expertise, so differing opinions are to be expected. In this example, the Forte managed services team was able to help bridge the gap between business and IT departments by creating improved communication channels supported by metrics upon which both sides could align. Staff augmentation helped the organization speed up the projects that were running smoothly.

Managed services helped evolve the organization’s emerging practice; staff augmentation accelerated it.

Summary: Managed services helped evolve the organization’s emerging practice; staff augmentation accelerated it.

C


As the case study illustrates, staff augmentation is most helpful for organizations looking to accelerate delivery. It’s not optimal for organizations looking to evolve. However, staff augmentation can help to supplement selected services, even within a managed services model.

Evolving Beyond Staff AugmentationHow to Determine When It’s Time to Move to Managed Services

When staff augmentation becomes the default, long-term staffing model, however, IT leadership deteriorates and delivery falters—all at a higher cost to the organization. The following “red flags” should serve as indicators to organizations that employ staff augmentation as a primary staffing model that it’s time to transition to a managed services model evolve rather than accelerate:

Constant change, no delivery

If an organization is constantly changing processes, restructuring teams, and shifting its goals, it’s likely that this chaos is the result of a lack of delivery. Even with flexible, agile models, without delivery, there’s no positive outcome. This is frustrating for the IT enterprise and the business, and as impatience with a lack of delivery mounts, the cycle only deteriorates. A lack of delivery should be regarded as a “check-engine” light that signifies a broken delivery system,

a lack of IT maturity, poorly defined business goals, or all of the above. It’s time to call the mechanic—a managed services partner—to evaluate, fix, and evolve what’s broken.

Delivered products never get usedFor any IT department, it’s infinitely frustrating to toil for months building products that never get into the hands of users—particularly when teams are working on Saturdays to make release deadlines. If a product is built but never seems to get to users, it’s almost certain that there are insufficient quality control mechanisms in the delivery process. Teams may require additional resources—training, specialty staff, quality assurance expertise—to be effective; business and IT goals are likely misaligned. Whatever the malfunction, the engine needs a tune-up. A steady output of bug-ridden, unused products is a signal that the system in which these products are built is faulty.

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The reliability of a managed services partner presents the greatest risk to the success of the model, so the vendor selection process must be carefully considered.

The traditional vendor partnership model usually plays out like this: The organization lists a series of directives on which the vendor then executes. After receiving the directives, a project manager from the vendor team scuttles off to dole out assignments to a team of unseen designers and developers. Two weeks later, a sprint review occurs with the “grand reveal” of what’s been accomplished during that time.

The results of this working model are typically mediocre. It isn’t an agile approach to developing software. More importantly, it’s not a partnership. Processes never improve. People never get better at their craft.

Managed services will produce the greatest benefit when it’s viewed as a partnership that emphasizes communication, transparency, and shared learnings. That isn’t to say an organization needs to hand off the keys to the business to achieve success: Competent managed services partners don’t try to reinvent the business. They adopt what’s working—those things that are already producing value—and evolve what’s not.

Evaluating a managed services provider is no easy task, but by focusing on which vendor will make the greatest improvement to advancing valuable outcomes, the choice will become clearer. When evaluating managed services providers, here are some questions to consider:

y Does this company’s price, industry knowledge, and experience fit with our expectations and budget?

y Has this company demonstrated that it’s capable of successful delivery within our industry?

y Will this company make us better at building software that helps our business?

y Are leaders from this company educators or implementors? Often, vendors prefer to conceal their learnings and processes out of fear that revealing those processes will negate the need for their services.

y How does this company define value? Will we be paying for hours or output?

Next Steps: Moving to Managed ServicesA Guide to Selecting the Right Partner

Quick Look

At a minimum, a managed services partner should be able to:

Help define a value proposition and align product behind that value

Establish a path to predictable, sustainable delivery

Establish a roadmap that identifies and prioritizes high-value features, then build those first

Emphasize and ensure quality in the delivered product and the system that builds it

Accelerate and evolve the maturity of internal product and engineering teams

Validate assumptions with data, quality assurance, and user testing

Create a system in which the organization is empowered to innovate beyond competitors


Most IT leaders we speak with seek just two simple things from a delivery partner: consistent delivery and effective communication. The traditional vendor partnership model—the “behind-the-curtain” approach described earlier—runs counter to these goals. With slow delivery and poor communication, IT leaders are left to wonder, “What are these teams actually doing? Why is this so difficult?”

Transparency and CommunicationThe Right Partner Can Help Businesses Focus on the Big Picture

When evaluating a vendor, transparency, clear communication, and actionable metrics of success are just as important as technical competence. Even if a vendor staffs the best engineers in the world, their work is worthless if it doesn’t create business value that can be effectively communicated and demonstrated to the greater organization. As the liaison between the business and technical aspects of an organization, the IT leader’s greatest ally is a service partner that can speak to both.

When a delivery roadmap is consistent, predictable, and effectively communicated, IT leaders are freed to focus on strategy and innovation rather than execution. What benefit might be gained by embracing new technologies like blockchain, IoT or AI? There are questions unfettered IT leaders can explore to push the organization forward.

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The Final VerdictDo You Need to Accelerate, or Evolve?

The choice between staff augmentation and managed services can best be summarized with a question: Do you want to accelerate, or do you want to evolve?

Evolving IT organizations often need additional firepower to meet delivery timelines. Staff augmentation offers a low-risk way to accelerate short-term staffing needs but doesn’t scale well as a continuous operating model. It works best if the correct system in place: With a dysfunctional system, staff augmentation simply adds premium fuel to a sputtering engine.

Managed services models offer organizations a way to evolve their IT practice while building solutions built for the long haul with a predictable cost model.

However, sometimes a hybrid of both managed services and staff augmentation is the best solution for organizations requiring a flexible delivery model that is tailor-made for their IT initiatives.

When it comes to building software, one size does not fit all. Choice, flexibility, and a spirit of partnership are essential ingredients in crafting the best solution for enterprises looking to evolve and accelerate their IT organizations. That’s why we at Forte Group work with you to design an engagement model that works best for your needs.

Chart Your Path

Evaluating how to accelerate and evolve your next business idea isn’t easy, which is why we created an interactive tool to help you weigh your options.

Find out what engagement model works best for your business by using visiting our website, fortegrp.com.

About Forte Group

Forte Group is a full-service software solutions and managed services resource for businesses seeking exceptional engineering talent and extraordinary software. We work with IT enterprises, business leaders, and technology companies to accelerate and evolve applications that consistently achieve valuable business outcomes.

We’re headquartered in Chicago, with delivery offices in Belarus and Ukraine.

Forte Group | 222 S Riverside Plaza, Chicago, IL 60606

You’re Going to Love Building Software With Us.

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services - Forte Group

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