Insights

What’s the right fit: Professional services, managed services, or staff augmentation?

Author: Chris Thompson

Business is expanding rapidly. As your customer base grows, providing high quality IT support and taking on projects and additional responsibilities has become increasingly difficult. Your staff are at capacity supporting the core business business. You need outside help but…you’re not quite sure which service model makes sense.

In this article, we’ll provide a short primer on three common service models including professional services, staff augmentation, and managed services and help you understand how each model can help your business achieve its goals.

Professional services

In this model, a licensed or certified professional performs specialized work for a specified amount of time, typically related to projects or product releases. The professional services model is ideal for when you need a professional with highly specialized skillsets to enact, implement, or customize an essential aspect of your business.

The duration of work may span the entire project lifecycle—for example, a project manager that oversees each milestone. Or the duration may only span a portion of the project lifecycle, such as solution testing and implementation. With professional services, you only pay for the services you need for a finite duration while gaining access to licensed or certified professionals to tackle complex projects.

Staff augmentation

If you have temporary personnel needs—for instance, accommodating a seasonal business spike or completing a project—staff augmentation can be the right choice. Best suited for shorter term needs, staff augmentation enables you to scale up or down rapidly and access qualified personnel who can step in and fill a role with minimal training.

Staff augmentation enables you to avoid recruiting and hiring time and expenses while still retaining control over the skills and experience you need. It gives you access to a larger talent pool and can be a great way to test expanded staffing before committing to hiring.

Managed services

With managed services, you get a full team of professionals who perform ongoing IT systems and processes on a day-to-day basis as a service. Managed services is a great option for service and support desks or content management and other back-office processes.

The managed services model frees up staff to focus on business priorities by offloading the maintenance and support of systems and processes to qualified teams who have specialized knowledge, experience, and best practices already in place. This option helps ensure predictable costs, deliverables, and performance outcomes that are tied to your service level agreement. Managed services can help you accelerate digital transformation and increase efficiency and quality.

Comparing professional services, staff augmentation, and managed services

To make it easy, we’ve put together a quick primer to help you choose the best option for your business.

Trust Beyondsoft for your business needs

Still not sure? Beyondsoft offers all three service models and can help you choose the right fit for your business. With a team of 26,000+ professionals across five different continents, we respond quickly to our customers’ needs on a local, regional, and global level. Over the years, we’ve partnered with some of the biggest names in technology to deliver custom, world-class solutions that accelerate business.

To learn more about how Beyondsoft can help your business, contact us today.