Which To Choose: Staff Aug or SaaS Anywhere?

Chris Loechel, May 5, 2022

As anyone who has ever done a home project can attest, using the right tool for the job can make all the difference. Just the other day, I was wrangling with a DIY challenge and spent hours trying to make a scattering of suboptimal tools I had work when a short run to the hardware store would have solved all my problems in minutes.

In much the same way in analytics consulting, I see my clients sometimes struggling to find the right service for their challenges of the near and long term. In this piece, I’ll share an overview of two seemingly similar service options and discern the right time to engage for each.

Table of Contents

What is Staff Augmentation?

A Staff Augmentation engagement is a time and materials consulting contract for one or more members of our award-winning consulting team for an extended period of time. Time and materials-based engagements are billed for just that: the time and materials used to complete the job.

This is often the go-to choice for organizations attempting to address a gap in the current team structure, whether it be bandwidth or subject matter expertise. The duration of these types of engagements can vary significantly with some as little as a month and others lasting for years. Staff Augmentation contracts are sold via statement of work stipulating resource and expected duration and are billed for hours incurred.

Simply stated, if you need to get stuff done and don’t know how you’ll be able to do it with your existing team, a Staff Augmentation contract might be the right fit for you.

What is SaaS Anywhere by PMsquare?

SaaS Anywhere is a managed services offering that delivers clients a Software-as-a-Service experience with their chosen analytics tools (Cognos, Tableau, Power BI, etc.) on their chosen platforms (on-premise, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc).

We achieve this through a proven methodology combining collaborative delivery, scheduled environment maintenance, and proactive environment monitoring using PMsquare Thrive. SaaS Anywhere contracts are annual terms, deliverable-based (see tiers and deliverable matrix here), and static in cost month-to-month.

Simply stated, if you want a sustainable, cost-effective approach to maintaining your analytics tools anywhere you want, SaaS Anywhere could be the answer.

How are they similar?

Both a staff augmentation engagement and a SaaS Anywhere subscription can be deployed to meet ongoing needs for technical expertise and/or additional bandwidth, whether that be an extra set of hands with development or administration experience or a team to ensure a new cloud environment is running optimally.

With both engagement types, delivery will be overseen by PMsquare’s world-class delivery organization. This includes regular meetings where we track and discuss everything from time incurred, to blockers, go-forward plans and recommendations, and any lessons learned.

How are they different?

Staff augmentation is billed on an as-incurred hourly basis while SaaS Anywhere is a monthly subscription. As such, staff augmentation “projects” will often be funded as a capital project whereas SaaS Anywhere would often be seen as an operational expense.

SaaS Anywhere has a finite and clear scope of deliverables and responsibilities whereas staff augmentation engagements places the responsibility on the client to curate a work queue for our consultant(s).

Staff Augmentation engagements do not receive agile sprint planning whereas SaaS Anywhere does as we proactively discuss successes/opportunities from past sprints and objectives/concerns for future ones.

SaaS Anywhere also comes equipped with PMsquare’s Thrive software offering for 24/7 environment monitoring. Thrive is used as a programmatic asset to help both the PMsquare and client teams optimally target areas of concern and areas of opportunity for the environment.

Dissimilar to staff augmentation, SaaS Anywhere is designed to be a turnkey defined services offering to offer full-spectrum support and ongoing maintenance for a broad spectrum of tools on a broad spectrum of infrastructure.

How to choose between SaaS Anywhere or a Staff Augmentation engagement

If your needs from a consulting partner are short-to-medium term (1-6 months) and/or lack clear deliverables or work items, consider a staff augmentation contract to meet whatever your needs are for the moment. This way, our award-winning consulting team members can help you with whatever analytics objectives are most pressing during the course of the engagement.

If you are looking for a cost-effective, sustainable way to care for your analytics environments on an ongoing basis regardless of where they currently are hosted, review the various tiers of SaaS Anywhere and reach out to PMsquare to discuss what tier would be the best fit for you.

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