What is "Team as a Service"?
Like software as a service, we thought it would be great if businesses could just "plug in" new teams and "switch on" new capabilities in the business. And everything "just works" with minimal training or supervision needs. And then either scale up according to requirements, or just switch off the teams after the work is finished or has shifted somewhere else.
So we have started offering "Team as a Service" so you can specify complex online-working projects and processes, in terms of the results needed and let us do the work of rapidly sourcing qualified freelancers, within a closely managed working method that doesn't increase your communication or supervision overheads.
The "Team as a Service" model is designed to be useful for companies which need to retain a high degree of control AND have requirements of skill and scale that are likely to change AND cannot commit to long provider sourcing or direct recruitment.
Benefits
- Remain focused on your intended results without getting stuck in the "how" or "who"
- Lower cost compared to recruiting local employees
- Higher transparency and control compared to normal agency solutions
- Completely customize your requirements and goals for each project, instead of being fixed in one standard solution
- Close down the team any time or segue their work into an ongoing process / support
- Delegate staff selection, training, supervision, and quality control to your project manager.
Situations where this could be useful
- Require fast results without long provider sourcing process
- Uncertain of exact staffing / skill requirements, and requirements may change over time
- Need rapid deployment at known cost
- Your organization has procedures for working with an agency but not for individual freelancer hiring
- You need employee-level visibility and right of approval on project workers
- Recruiting employees into your office is either too costly or too inflexible
- Hard to find exact skills needed when recruiting locally
Example Team 1
Team for constructing a website.
- Team leader and webmaster
- Web designer
- Content editor
- One or more content authors / researchers
- SEO researcher
Example Team 2
Team for producing an app
- Team leader and app manager
- Visual designer
- Lead developer
- One or more specialist developers
- Content editor and tester
Example Team 3
Team for market-specific B2B business development
- Team leader and key sales contact
- Lead researcher and junior sales
- Web content and translation editor
- Marketing materials designer
- Ad campaign manager or liaison
Team as a Service solution
As you can see in the above examples, a variety of skills are required which you are unlikely to have immediately to hand. If your organization has all the right people, they are probably siloed in different departments under different management lines, and if they are good, they will already be busy with core duties. And if your idea is new or experimental, then it is pretty likely that your organization does not have all the right skilled people available. And hiring people first without exact experience of who you need, or proof of concept... well, most organizations won't take these kind of risks. That means an organization will limit its own adventurousness just because of a perceived risk in acquiring talent. Put like this, and in a global surplus sea of digital talent, this should appear a pretty poor excuse for inaction.
Even if you do have all the right people with free time and under your management line, the work of assembling a team is likely to put you off the getting stuck into implementation of your ideas.
Outsourcing using the TaaS approach means you can refocus on implementation very flexibly. By searching outside you can select the right balance of skills and cost without any employee commitments, and potentially access more specialized skills than you would be able to get from your generalist core staff.
The above examples also capture three common situations where an original setup or experimental project is likely to need to transition to a longer-term support or development function. While, by definition, project teams are temporary assemblies of people, often taken away from their core working duties when in-house, with an outsourced team you can shift the service into an ongoing mode without the concern that you are competing with main human resources.
Another benefit of outsourced plugin teams is that you don't need to pay attention to any particular doctrine, politics, or methodology that dominates inside your office. You can try out more informal ways of working, or conversely create highly structured working approaches, without the need to debate or defend your ideas... you can just focus on getting the results without having to build a supposedly permanent capacity / resource in order to do so.
About KnowledgePower
KnowledgePower is a UK Ltd digital agency experienced in assisting a wide range of digital-first and digital-transition business models. We are highly experienced in outsourcing and remote team management.
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