You are determined to expand your operations and continue growing, but traditional recruiting doesn’t align with your timelines and expectations. It’s time to bet on something new — a modern solution for companies determined to move forward: Staff Augmentation.
Beyond being one of the main strategies to integrate high-level talent in just a few days, you will unlock its full potential with an error-free process driven by best practices.
At Crazy Imagine Software, we have supported hundreds of processes throughout LATAM. Regardless of the sector, all share the same critical steps that ensure successful talent integration. Here’s our formula.
Talent Provider Selection
This is a defining moment, equal to or even more critical than hiring staff. Selecting the talent provider means choosing a partner who will accompany you step by step to grow and help you achieve your business objectives. It’s no minor step.
From our experience, many companies fail to achieve the results they expect because they choose the wrong provider — not an efficient, solution-oriented ally who truly understands their priorities and delivers the best solution.
When evaluating potential providers for your projects, use this checklist to mark the most important items that will help you identify the one that genuinely aligns with your vision and meets your technical requirements.
- Industry and technical experience.
- Legal and regulatory compliance.
- Support structure.
- Integration flexibility.
- Culture and values alignment.
- Pricing models.
- Talent replacement mechanisms.
- Talent selection and evaluation process.
Team Onboarding and Alignment
A complete integration prevents wasted time for everyone. A missed access or an unclear communication channel hinders effective onboarding and threatens to delay the workflow. More than once, we’ve seen a developer struggle on their first day or week because they didn’t receive the necessary permissions on time.
Every mistake, no matter how small, pushes the production cycle away from its optimal state. This checklist ensures you follow up on all processes and actions that build the foundation for subsequent development. It covers work tools, responsibilities, deliverables, meeting schedules and reviews, digital security, and other aspects.
- Fundamental work rules: quality and delivery criteria.
- Work meeting schedule.
- Goals and deliverables: what is needed and when.
- Acceptance criteria per deliverable and milestone.
- Communication channels.
- Access: repositories, test environments, boards, and emails.
- Assigned mentor to resolve initial doubts.
- Security measures: authentication and minimum permissions.
Compliance and Security
Managing sensitive data is always delicate, especially when handled by a temporary team. In these cases, you must add multiple security mechanisms to protect access to information and prevent situations that could disrupt the work environment.
These items will help you meet today’s standards for data exchange and usage, and more importantly, allow you to implement processes that leave a trace of what happens in case of any eventualities.
- Backups with defined recovery objectives.
- Audit log: who accesses, what changes, and when.
- Least privilege permissions and two-step verification.
- Data classification.
- Third-party assessments.
SLA and Operational Continuity
Service-Level Agreements (SLA) are foundational documents, yet several companies overlook them by prioritizing fast onboarding. It’s a mistake that always comes at a high cost.
These agreements establish the capabilities to resolve all problems that threaten to delay or interrupt the project. They include clear guidelines and process structures to optimize time and respond effectively to any eventualities.
Use these items to define what’s urgent, how failures are communicated, and within what timeframe responses are made:
- Executive report with risks, decisions, and next actions.
- Manual service review with improvement actions.
- Escalation path (provider and client) with times and responsibilities.
- Service indicators: mean time to resolution and SLA compliance.
- Steps for critical incidents: who does what and in what order.
- Replacement plan and maximum coverage time.
- Emergency windows and maintenance channels.
- Service hours, response time, and severity levels.
- Security matrix with concrete examples.
Knowledge Transfer and Closure
Ending a project doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over just like that. Once the external talent finishes their work, the in-house team must continue it to ensure continuity of improvements and prevent wasted effort and money.
Every Staff Augmentation project closure involves documentation and credential transfer. It’s critical that you supervise it to ensure nothing is left pending once the external reinforcement disengages from your team. Here’s what you should pay close attention to:
- Brief satisfaction survey.
- Project archiving and versioning in the official repository.
- Formal closure approval by the project manager.
- Lessons learned and improvements for the next cycle.
- Final project metrics and project compliance.
- Post-delivery stabilization plan.
- List of accesses to revoke or rotate with an assigned responsible.
- Delivery and verification of repositories, credentials, and boards.
- Planned and completed handover sessions.
- Documentation of decisions, operation manuals, and support guides.