Team As A Service (TaaS) (2024)

Outsourcing doesn't have to mean call centres in distant lands,
lengthy contract negotiations,
and stressful supervision of ultra-junior staff.

Here's a new alternative...

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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.

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.