Q: We want a few people to maintain our systems long-term — is that outsourcing or a managed team?
A: Start with one question: who decides which bug gets fixed first this week?
If someone on your side sends us a task list every Monday and our people work through it and report hours, that's IT staffing. The people are under your direction; we handle recruiting, social insurance, and backup personnel. Contracts are usually written in person-months — one Java developer or two frontend developers, spelled out.
If it's the reverse — the system is handed to us, and we watch the monitoring, plan releases, and decide which hole gets patched first, syncing with you only at a monthly meeting — that's a managed tech team. The contract names which systems, what availability, what response times. It never names headcount.
Q: So how do the prices differ?
A: Person-months are easy: headcount times rate. Managed teams can't be priced that way. The same system might take three people two weeks in month one — filling in documentation, sorting out accounts, setting up monitoring — and by month four, one person checking in twice a week is enough. We usually quote a monthly package, pricier at first, flattening later. It can look like a bad deal at first glance; you have to spread the math across a year.
Q: Does a managed team mean handing everything over and washing our hands?
A: No. Three things always stay in the client's hands: admin access to the code repository, the ability to download database backups, and control of the domain and certificates. Without those, switching vendors gets painful. We once took over a system where the previous vendor had walked off with the domain registrar account — the transfer alone took three weeks.
Q: And where does recruitment-as-a-service fit?
A: Recruiting on your behalf ends at 'the person joins.' After that, it's yours. We help write the JD, screen resumes, and sit in on interviews; once someone starts, they're managed by you. Some clients start there, then shift to a managed team once it feels right; others hire and lead the person themselves. Both are fine.
Q: How do we choose?
A: Here's a crude method. Pull your tickets from the last three months. If 80% or more are scattered chores — 'change this word,' 'that button won't click' — and you have someone internally to assign work, staffing is cheaper. If the same module keeps breaking and nobody can explain how it works, you probably don't need more hands; you need someone to take that module over as a whole.
Q: Is there a middle ground?
A: Yes, and it's common. For example, two staffed people on-site, one of them doubling as our point of contact, summarizing system status weekly and drifting gradually toward a managed model. You don't have to rewrite the contract on day one.
That day, the client chose staffing — with one addition: the point of contact sends a one-pager every Friday. Nothing complicated: the 7 things changed this week, the 2 planned for next week. Six months later, that one-pager had become the monthly meeting material, and the contract changed too. Nobody planned any of it.
