Project-based delivery, senior-led PODs, and getting paid for outcomes instead of hours.

I spent 20 years in staffing before I started New Gig. That was long enough to watch the same two options let companies down over and over. The consulting firms show up with a polished deck and a big invoice. The staffing shops send over a stack of resumes and wish you luck. Neither one is actually on the hook for the thing you care about, which is the work getting done.

So we built something different. Not a tweak on the old model, a replacement for it.

The math on the old way isn’t pretty

The frustration is backed up by the numbers. The Standish Group has tracked software and IT project outcomes for decades, and the picture hasn’t improved much. Only about 31% of projects come in on time, on budget, and doing what they were supposed to do. Roughly 19% fail outright. Everything else lands in the messy middle, late or over budget or short on the value that was promised. Big projects do worse, not better.

When you dig into why, it usually comes back to the same thing. The people doing the work weren’t accountable for the outcome. They were accountable for filling a seat or shipping a deliverable, and those are not the same as solving the problem.

What a POD actually is

A POD is a small, senior-led team built around an outcome you define. Not a role we fill. Not a body we rent you by the hour. A team that owns a piece of work end to end and is measured on whether that work succeeds.

We like to say we don’t fill roles, we fill responsibilities. That sounds like a slogan until you see what it changes in practice. When the team owns the responsibility, they care about the parts nobody wrote into the job description. They care about the handoffs, the edge cases, the thing that breaks at 4pm on a Friday. That ownership is the whole difference.

It’s worth being clear about what a POD is not. It isn’t staff augmentation with a nicer name. Staff aug hands you people and leaves the management, the direction, and the risk on your plate. A POD comes with its own senior lead, its own way of working, and a commitment to the outcome. You’re not babysitting contractors. You’re handing a problem to a team that knows how to close it.

Picture the difference. The old way, you write a job description, wait weeks for resumes, interview a stack of people, hire someone, and then spend months hoping they work out while you manage them day to day. The POD way, you describe the outcome, we stand up a team that has solved it before, and they get moving. The risk shifts from you to us, which is exactly where it should sit.

How it works

Four steps, and we keep them simple. First, we define the outcome with you, in plain language, so everyone agrees what success looks like. Second, we design the POD, pulling the right senior people for that specific job. Third, we launch, and we move fast here. Our average from a signed SOW to a working team is under nine days. Fourth, we measure against the outcome we agreed on and scale up or wind down from there.

No two-year roadmap. No army of junior consultants learning the work on your dime. The people on the POD have done the work before.

The cost question

PODs typically run 30 to 50% less than the big logos. People ask how, and the answer is boring. We don’t carry the overhead the large firms pass on to you. There’s no bench tax, no layers of management billing against your project, no junior staff training themselves at your expense. You pay for senior people doing senior work, and not much else.

Where PODs fit

We run PODs across five areas: AI and automation, data foundations, cloud and platform, cyber readiness, and finance modernization. Different problems, same model. A senior team, a defined outcome, a fast start, and real accountability for the result.

The whole pitch

You tell us what success looks like. We own getting there. That’s it. If that sounds different from what you’ve been sold by consulting firms and staffing agencies for years, good. That difference is the entire reason we exist.

Sources

1. Standish Group, CHAOS Report on IT project outcomes: https://opencommons.org/CHAOS_Report_on_IT_Project_Outcomes