Nearly every IT Director who’s been in the seat for more than a few years has a contractor story they’d rather not repeat. A project manager who was excellent in the interview and mediocre on delivery. A day rate that crept upward once the project was too far along to change course. A post-engagement IR35 review that turned into weeks of admin nobody budgeted for.
So, when Project Management as a Service gets pitched as the answer to resourcing pressure, a healthy dose of scepticism isn’t unreasonable. It’s earned.
The scenario: an IT Director who’s heard this pitch before
Picture a Head of IT at a mid-sized organisation, weighing up whether to bring in outside project management support for an upcoming infrastructure programme. She’s not against the idea in principle. She’s against repeating a specific set of mistakes.
Her objections, roughly:
- “The last flexible resourcing model we used still left us exposed on IR35. Who’s actually taking that risk this time?”
- “We paid for bench time before, people billing us between projects who weren’t doing anything for us.”
- “Every PM we’ve brought in has needed weeks to get up to speed on our environment before they were any use.”
These aren’t vague hesitations. They’re specific, and they deserve specific answers, not reassurance.
What actually addresses each concern
Vague confidence doesn’t move a sceptical IT Director. Specifics do.
On IR35, the honest answer is that a model like Stoneseed’s PMaaS is built to sit outside that risk entirely, because the project professionals are part of Stoneseed’s own resource pool rather than individually engaged contractors. That’s not a workaround to IR35 compliance; it removes the classification question from the client’s side of the table altogether.
On bench-time cost, under a pay-as-you-use model, there’s no such thing as paying for someone doing nothing. You’re billed for days worked, not for a retainer or a fixed-term contract sitting idle between phases. For an IT Director who’s previously paid for capacity she wasn’t using, that distinction is the difference between “flexible resourcing” as a marketing phrase and flexible resourcing as an actual line on the invoice.
On ramp-up time, this one’s harder to wave away with a policy answer, because it genuinely depends on the breadth of experience the provider can draw on. What tends to reassure a sceptical buyer here isn’t a promise, it’s the shape of the resource pool itself, professionals who’ve worked across transformation, infrastructure, digital and business-change programmes in multiple sectors arrive already fluent in the language of delivery, even if they need a short induction into your specific environment.
Turning your own scepticism into the internal case
If you recognise these objections because you’ve raised them yourself, the useful next move isn’t to resolve your doubt privately and then present a polished recommendation. It’s to bring the objections into the room deliberately, because whoever else needs to sign off, finance, procurement, your own leadership, is likely to raise the same three concerns, and you’ll want answers ready rather than looking blindsided.
The internal case tends to land better when it’s framed as “here’s what I checked, and here’s what I found,” rather than “here’s what I’d like to do.” Naming the IR35 exposure directly, and showing it’s structurally removed rather than just reassured away, does more to bring a cautious CFO or board along than a general endorsement of flexibility ever will.
A practical next step is to keep the first engagement small and specific: a single defined resourcing gap, with a clear scope and a fixed, visible cost. That gives you, and anyone else who had to sign off, a low-risk way to test whether the reassurances hold up in practice, before any conversation about a broader or longer-term arrangement.