The concept of APaaS, a different way of doing things – our Eureka moment.
APaaS grew from our frustration working with traditional methods of managing and supporting end user services across multiple client accounts. Through working on many large digital workplace transformation projects over the last 20 years, we were continually faced with the same challenges time and again. The majority of IT teams are resourced to deliver an ongoing steady state service. Delivering a large-scale transformation project requires many more people with additional skill sets for a limited time. Even small projects can stretch a team putting services at risk of failure. The traditional resource model approach to overcome the challenge has always been to bring in contract staff to supplement the existing team. Our experience using this approach had issues:
* Selective interviews take time and have a significant cost
* Even with highly selective interviews the quality of contract staff was variable, it could take two weeks or longer to identify poor performers and another six weeks to onboard a replacement.
* Delays to forecasted start dates, unavailability of software media, lack of information on license entitlement all add cost to project budgets by increasing or extending contract resources to meet project milestones..
There had to be a better way…
* A fixed unitised price per service offering
* An on-demand service, we would only pay for the service we actually consume
* A remote service offering to reduce our cost management cost
* Outcome based approach
* Flexibility to quickly ramp up/down volumes
* A personalised service to match our needs
* High quality delivery
We couldn’t find anyone offering IT services on this basis so we developed our own set of service offerings. We approached a number of contacts across the industry to float our ideas and they loved it. This confirmed we had a service offering clients would buy into and APaaS was born.