How are Managed and Professional Services different?
Managed Services provide an ongoing service that supports your organization, ensures steady-state operations, and incrementally improves its use of technology. Managed Services represents a team of power administrators that can serve as your admin team or supplement the team in place. Professional Services create larger, one-time changes such as retiring a legacy solution, migrating a large piece of data, bringing a community online, or other discrete activity.
We often provide both services to organizations with whom we work. Managed Services provides context and understanding of your organization and its use of technology. It also reduces risk and improves outcomes of projects as we can prepare the environment in advance by clearing technical debt (e.g. outdated code or unused fields), providing vital information about how your organization works, and ensuring realistic time and budget estimates.
How are we different?
Managed Services is central to what we do. We are primarily a renovation partner – we help organizations stay on top of the platform and continuously improve. This is quite a bit different than most partners who primarily focus on one-time deployments. Our company is built around the long-term trusted relationships that we build and cultivate in Managed Services, and a large percentage of the projects we run are with existing Managed Services clients. We believe our model best serves those organizations that are post-deployment and have not been able to fully realize their vision for the platform.
Our company is also a bit different. We only hire full-time, nonprofit technology professionals. We do not hire contractors or sub-contract any of our work. We want you to have a consistent experience with a team of exceptionally qualified individuals.
Our firm only works in the social sector. We work with nonprofit organizations, community development corporations (CDCs) and community development financial institutions (CDFIs). We believe the needs of the social sector are unique and best served by a team of professionals with deep experience in the sector.
What is the commitment to a Managed Services contract?
We start with an initial assessment and work with clients to build an annual plan. Our goal is to be proactive and strategic in our approach, which means our work with clients evolves over time, adapting to the changing needs of the organization and the staff’s fluency with the technology.
That being said, all of our Managed Services agreements operate on a 30-day cancellation policy. We believe we should earn your confidence each month. If we are not the right partner for you, we can use that 30-day to tie up any loose ends. We believe you will stay with us for years, as many organizations have, but that’s a decision you make, not one your contract locks you into.
Do I get to work with the same person or people?
Every Managed Services client has an assigned Client Success Manager (CSM). Your CSM gets to know you serves as your single point of contact. They can draw on resources from our team of analysts, developers, architects and more. Your CSM ensures you have specialized skills available to you, and ensures they can engage the right Craftsman resource effectively and efficiently. Typically, a CSM will have a small portfolio of 5-7 similar organizations. The portfolio is small enough where they are not being pulled in an unmanageable number of directions, but large enough so that they can leverage learning across a cross-section of organizations. Our Technical Analysts (TAs) are dedicated Managed Services resources who work behind the scenes to help resolve technical issues. Internally, we share best practices and learning across the dozens of organizations we support – ensuring we can find the right solution most efficiently.
How far does a 40-hour agreement go?
A full-time staff person, in theory, can work 160 hours in a month. It is reasonable to ask how can we accomplish more in 25% of the total time? First, it is important to note that CTG takes on the professional development, staff management, PTO + holidays of our team – so the gap is already quite a bit more narrow. That means you will always have coverage from CTG during our working hours, even if your CSM is out of office. And you no longer need to worry about a gap in coverage due to staff turnover.
We also benefit greatly from learning across the portfolio. We have solved thousands of issues and can bring those solutions immediately forward. We have templates, documentation and best practices. Your CSM is typically working with similar organizations alongside yours, so you will benefit from the work happening elsewhere.
And, the reality is there are certainly highly specialized skills you only need sometimes. You would never hire a Salesforce Developer or Architect or other highly specialized skill if you only need them a handful of hours on any given month. But, those handful of hours might be critical. Your CSM can draw from a pool of resources as needed to meet your occasional need for specialized resources. That may include skills relating to applications, custom development, data migration, or a specialized area of the platform.
How do I get started?
Give us a call at (617) 848-9006 or send us an email at info@craftsmantech.com. You can submit a contact form for Managed Services here. We would be glad to talk about our work and see if we are a fit.