What Is TAAS (Team as a Service) and Why Is It Becoming So Popular?

Jul 12

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Understanding TAAS

The importance of agility in today's fast-moving global marketplace can't be overstated, and it's not always advantageous to rely on your permanent employees to cover every opportunity that arises. Too often, that results in burnout and overtime, which in turn affects employee morale and engagement. Keeping a core group of permanent employees who can maintain a reasonable work-life balance and then bringing in extra people to meet an intense short-term demand is far more functional. This approach allows you to draw on skill sets you don't currently have in-house, without the expense of new permanent hires.Up until now, you had two choices if you wanted to bring in extra help: individual contractors or outside vendors.

Individual Contractors

Organizations' need for flexibility is the main reason for the stratospheric increase in the 1099 economy. However, there is a basic disconnect between hiring individual contractors and needing a team that can work together. A batch of independent contractors won't have a bond to each other or to your company. If you need these individuals to collaborate as a team, you have to invest valuable manager time toward making the team mesh. Further imbalances come about when you have a team that's a mix of permanent employees and contract workers because the mindsets of these two groups are very different.

Outside Vendors

Outsourcing can give you the advantage of lower labor costs, but cultural problems and general loss of control often result. When you can't directly interact with people and processes, you often end up sacrificing whatever resources you originally expected to save. Furthermore, traditional outsourcing companies are separate organisms with their eyes on their own profitability.

TAAS Provides a Third Option

Contracting with a TAAS provider gives you the best of both worlds when you need rapid scalability. With TAAS, you hire a remote team of experts to work with you directly. They have their own on-site manager to handle recruiting, wage negotiations and payroll, but you have the final say over who gets hired and what qualifications they have. And, unlike when you outsource to an external vendor, the TAAS model gives you direct personal interaction with each individual on your team. As a result, you approach your business intelligently and get all the control you need over the work, but your resources aren't being drained.

TAAS Offers a New Model for Collaboration

Improving cooperation is essential to doing business in today's world, and the TAAS model exemplifies this ideal. You collaborate with your TAAS provider to assemble the ideal group of people. The on-site TAAS manager appropriately publishes your job description to attract the best local talent. You may assist in the team selection process, but you don't have to engage in the actual hiring logistics. Instead, you simply deal with the TAAS provider. This process streamlines the acquisition of human capital and gets your project off the ground rapidly. In the occasionally unavoidable scenario of a worker becoming problematic, you don't have to worry about legal risks involved in termination. With TAAS, your personnel matters are handled with maximum efficiency.In addition to removing the whole human resources piece, TAAS also eliminates your concern for development environment, issue tracking, project management, adequate servers and so on. Your in-house team can focus on the business and its values while maintaining granular-level input and control over the final product.

Creative Collaboration Options

In short, TAAS can be whatever you want it to be. Instead of traditional outsourcing, in which the vendor simply informs you of the services it provides, your TAAS team creates the model that works best for you. You choose the number of people you want on your team and how many months you need them. They can rise to the level of digital strategizing and best-practice advising, including scoping, planning, testing and documentation. Plus, their arrangement with you can be open-ended, episodic or merely temporary while you build your own permanent in-house team. TAAS teams can come to your place of work or be on another continent. You can empower them to interact directly with your customers or keep them behind the scenes.

TAAS Isn't Just for IT

While the most common demand for TAAS tends to focus on software development, UX design and IT, its potential extends far beyond the technical realm. Whether you need professional HR services, sales network management, or someone to contact prospects and grow your revenue pipeline, there's a team of experts available for that purpose.

The Next Step in Globalization

With TAAS, your company no longer has to exist in one single location. As work products become electronic, they can be passed from one side of the planet to the other in mere seconds. TAAS allows you to keep your core permanent employee group lean and focused, allowing them to maintain the vision and strategy that makes your company profitable. Your executives can be the ones to put the story together while the data they need for that story is collected and analyzed by your Team as a Service. Your time to market shrinks to its shortest possible duration, and your reputation blossoms.Whether you take advantage of a local team or a remote one, TAAS is a tool you need to be aware of. Having the TAAS option in your toolkit keeps your company competitive and agile, able to confidently take on any project and deliver it profitably.