Delivery Model Assessment: Extended Team vs Managed Project
CHOOSING THE RIGHT DELIVERY MODEL
Every organisation approaches software delivery differently. Some teams have the internal leadership, technical expertise and delivery structure to manage development directly. Others prefer a fully managed approach where delivery, governance and outcomes are handled by an experienced partner.
Fill out the survey below to receive a recommendation based on our experience of working with customers on whether an Extended Team or Managed Project model is the best fit for your business.
Extended Team
We provide skilled engineers and specialists who integrate into your team and work under your direction. Your organisation retains responsibility for project delivery while expanding its technical capability.
Managed Project
We provide the full delivery team and take responsibility for project execution. Our team manages delivery, governance and outcomes while keeping you closely aligned through structured reporting and collaboration.
Find Your Ideal Delivery Model
Answer the questions below to get a recommendation on which approach is optimal for your business.
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OWNERSHIP MAKES OR BREAKS DELIVERY
What is the best delivery model for building bespoke or custom software?
One of the most important factors in developing bespoke or custom software successfully is the choice of delivery model.
What do we mean by a delivery model? Sometimes this means Agile or Waterfall, insourced or outsourced, offshore or nearshore….
In this case, we mean who owns the delivery of the software when some of the people working on it are external? Who is responsible for the project that will create the software when external resources are used?
That might sound like a dumb question – surely whoever is paying for the software is responsible? Ultimately, yes, but building bespoke software is a specialised task, and that doesn’t just mean the coding.
TWO MODELS; ONE CRITICAL CHOICE
Delivery Models
There are two main delivery models that have different ways of allocating responsibility, or ownership of risks, for a software development project that isn’t carried out entirely in-house.
In one model, a vendor owns the delivery of the project. They decide what resources are required and manage those resources to complete the project. Usually, they commit to delivering the project at an agreed, fixed price. This is sometimes referred to as a “managed project” or “turnkey”.
In the other model, the vendor provides resources that will work as an extension of the customer’s own team. The customer will decide what resources are needed and will manage the project to completion. The vendor’s responsibility is limited to providing appropriately skilled and experienced resources. This model is sometimes referred to as “Extended Team” or “Team Augmentation”.
Which Model is Best?
As you would expect, each model has its pros and cons.
Managed Project
Pros
Cost Certainty
Vendor owns risks
Accessing project delivery and software development expertise
Simple management
Cons
More expensive than Extended Team
Less visibility
Extended Team
Pros
Control and visibility
Cost effective
Cons
Customer owns the risks
More management
Requires in-house project management and software development expertise
Brian Wyatt, Director of Extended Teams
Evolved Ideas
Brian is Principal Consultant and Director of Extended Teams at Evolved Ideas, working closely with clients from early strategy through to high-level requirements definition and Agile development. He facilitates stakeholder workshops, documents business processes, and develops logical data models and user stories that translate complex ideas into clear, structured delivery plans.
He also oversees our Extended Teams client engagements, focusing on account satisfaction, retention and long-term development. By maintaining strong relationships and clear delivery structures, Brian ensures our extended teams integrate effectively with client organisations and continue delivering value as projects evolve and scale.
Organisational Factors
These positives and negatives mean that the two models suit different types of organisations.
While there are nuances and caveats, the types of organisations that would be best served by each model can be described as follows:
Organisations where Managed Projects are appropriate:
Little or no experience of software development projects
Limited or no in-house project management capability
Limited or no in-house software development capability
Examples would include startups with non-technical founders, SMEs outside the technology sector, larger organisations that usually run packaged software but now need a niche application.
Organisations where Extended Teams are appropriate:
Experienced in software development
Have in-house project management capabilities
Have in-house software development capabilities
Examples would include startups with technical founders, scaleups, established businesses with ongoing software development needs, e.g., have a software product that they sell, have a proprietary software platform that is a differentiator for their business.
AI | DELIVERY | OWNERSHIP
How Does AI Affect This?
A few thoughts on AI and delivery models. The release of programming tools based on large language models (LLMs) is changing how software is built. Just how significant these changes will be is the subject of a very technical (and very heated!) debate that we’re not going to get into here.
Where LLMs are currently having the most impact is on programming – the generation of the code for a software application. In time, no doubt the impacts will be broader, but for now, that’s the main area.
Regarding AI and delivery models, we’d suggest that so far LLMs don’t affect which delivery model you should select. While coding can be carried out by, or with the assistance of LLMs, coding is only one part of a software development project. Consider – how are unclear or conflicting requirements collected and agreed? How are the right architectural choices made? How is security and data protection handled? How are project resources, risks and issues managed?
So, while some of the techniques being used to build software are evolving rapidly at the moment, and we are beginning to see significant improvements in the productivity of software engineers, the skills and experience that you need outside of coding in order to build software successfully are not changing as yet.
FIND YOUR FIT
Which is the Right Delivery Model for You?
Hopefully this article has given you a useful overview of the different delivery models you can use to build your software, and when each model is appropriate. As we’ve discussed, the key factor is how much capability exists within your organisation to plan and execute a software development project. Often this is very clear cut, but in other cases it may not be, as there may be some resources in the organisation with some experience, or people that might have the skills are tied up on another activity, or it may not be completely clear what any skills gap might be.
To help with deciding on which is the right delivery model for your software development project, we’ve put together a tool that helps you identify which model is likely to work best for you, available via this link.
BEYOND COST SAVINGS
Why Choose Evolved Ideas
Software development leaders often see saving money as the primary benefit when they are looking at extending or augmenting their development teams. Nearshore developers can have attractive day rates compared to onshore resources, but using Extended Teams has other benefits.
One of these is the ability to deliver business value faster than an organisation would be able to do by hiring permanent team members. By working with a partner that has an existing talent pool and the ability and experience to find and attract high quality development staff quickly, project teams can be put in place more rapidly than is possible by hiring in-house.
Is this a quantifiable benefit though? We would say that it is. Most projects have a business case – if the business spends money building this then it’s either going to increase revenue or reduce cost. If you can deliver that revenue increase or cost saving faster, then the business starts making or saving money earlier.
Another way of looking at it is how many extra features could be delivered by using an Extended Team, and how much that would reduce the project’s backlog by.
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