A services firm had to move off an ageing platform onto something it could keep building on. The migration itself was a defined piece of work with a finish line, but the months around it would need noticeably more people than the team had — and noticeably more than it would need once the move was done. The delivery lead was clear about the bind: hiring permanently for the crunch meant carrying that cost through the quiet months that followed, while doing it short-handed meant a migration that dragged and a team worn out by the end of it.
The honest answer was temporary capacity that behaved like part of the team, not a detached crew running a parallel project.
What the gap really was
- The work had a clear beginning and end, with a demand curve that rose and then fell away.
- Permanent hiring would have left the firm over-staffed once the migration finished.
- A migration done while also keeping the lights on needed people who could do both without supervision.
- The team that remained had to understand the new platform, not just inherit it.
How we approached it
We fielded people who had done migrations of this kind before and knew the failure modes — the data that does not move cleanly, the integration nobody documented, the cutover that has to be reversible. They worked inside the client’s team and to its delivery lead, on the same backlog as everyone else, so the migration and the day-to-day were not two separate efforts pulling in different directions.
As the crunch passed, we scaled the engagement down to match the falling demand, on the client’s timetable. Throughout, the people who would stay were kept close to the new platform so the knowledge did not leave with the people who did. Flexing up for the push and down afterwards, without the continuity snapping, was the whole arrangement.
Where it stands
The migration completed without the team being ground down to finish it, and the firm did not spend the following quarters paying for capacity it no longer used. The people who remained run the new platform with a real understanding of how it was built. The crunch was covered for as long as it lasted and no longer.