Why Managed Services is More than a Help Desk

When comparing types of consulting engagements, Managed Services is often viewed as the less sexy version of a Statement of Work. For clients, they view it as a long-term commitment and a burden to ensure they are filling the time. For consultants, they often view it as a glorified ticket executer, stuck on one client with no project diversity. My goal is to show you how Managed Services agreements can be used as a cost-effective means to see exponential ROI with your consulting agreements and, how when executed properly, are more successful than your traditional Statements of Work Projects.

Let us start with some basic definitions….

Statement of Work (SOW): It is the narrative description of a project’s work requirement. It defines project-specific activities, deliverables and timelines for a vendor providing services to the client.

Managed Services: the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining, and anticipating the need for, a range of processes and functions in order to improve operations and cut expenses.

In both cases you are executing on work, but the major difference is that a Statement of Work has a defined timeline and defined deliverables, where Managed Services is more of a subscription of hours for an extended period (typically 12 months).

Here are the four reasons you should consider Managed Services for executing your next project.

Strategic Partnership – One should consider the length of time for a managed service agreement as a benefit, not a burden. Partnering with a consulting firm for multiple months, allows them to intimately get to know your business, your objectives, and your current challenges. This insight and fresh set of eyes allows consultants to be more prescriptive in suggesting projects to help achieve your goals. I always encourage clients to view Managed Service consultants as an extension of their team, helping fill resource gaps they may otherwise not have.

Execute Large Scale Initiatives – At Solving IT Edge, we do not limit the type of work which can be executed within a Managed Service agreement. Our clients use Managed Services as a mechanism to implement new Salesforce Communities, roll-out Marketing Automation tools, build custom integrations, and implement Einstein Analytics for improved business intelligence (just to name a few). While these implementations would typically be viewed as SOW worthy, we see executing large scale initiatives as activities which can take place within Managed Services. The benefit is there is more flexibility to execute in an agile methodology and reprioritize feature requests as they come from the business. There is also more flexibility for post go-live support and a built in mechanism to build out a backlog.

Higher ROI – Locking in a long-term agreement means Consulting Firms can better forecast our resources and pass on the savings to you in the form of a lower rate! Our managed services rate can be up to $30 / hour lower than our standard SOW rates. Lower rates translate to higher ROI!

Flexible Contracting – At Solving IT Edge, we strive to make partnering with us as easy as possible. We know all businesses have ebbs and flows and competing priorities which pop-up from time to time. Because of this, we allow flexibility with managed services.