There is an increasing drive to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies through technological innovation. This naturally translates into a growing number of IT projects, where success or failure of a business can often hinge on the ability to complete these projects on time, within budget, and to specification.

Developing in house capabilities to complete these projects can be a costly and risky venture, particularly when the IT needs of an organization are constantly changing. Moreover, in today's business world where falling behind the IT innovation curve can lead to disaster, very few companies have static IT needs.

Even companies who are content with IT business as usual can easily find themselves relying on outdated legacy systems which, upon failure, could cripple a business. When companies look for outside help in completing IT projects, they are generally considering two delivery models: staff augmentation and project outsourcing.

IT staff augmentation allows a company to add staff to their teams based on the additional skills required to support their initiatives. Resources are employed by the staff augmentation firm.Companies may easily ramp up and down to meet changing demand without shouldering the cost and liabilities of additional full-time employees.

IT project outsourcing allows a company to execute entire projects using the resources of another firm. In some cases, this can also take the form of "out tasking", where specific tasks of a project might be outsourced to a sub team which is staffed and managed by the outsourcer.

The project outsourcing approach allows companies the benefits of external expertise, cost management and risk mitigation so they can concentrate existing resources on their core operations.

A Hybrid Approach

For most companies there is no one size fits all approach. Some needs are best met through staff augmentation, others through project outsourcing, and sometimes these needs overlap.

Consider an example of two interdependent projects: the first project lies within a company's core competencies, but additional specialists are required to complete the project successfully, the second project lies outside of the company's core competencies altogether. In this case a hybrid approach may work best, where staff augmentation is used to acquire the required specialists for the first project and project outsourcing is used to complete the second one.

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