Your IT lead keeps the wheel.
You have someone internal who knows the business. We add the bench, the night coverage and the specialist skills that one person cannot be — with the split of duties written down before we start.
What we take, and what stays with them
Co-managed goes wrong when it is a takeover wearing a friendlier name. The defence against that is boring and effective: decide who owns what, write it down, and revisit it out loud every quarter.
A written split of duties
Who owns patching, who owns the firewall, who is called at two in the morning. On paper, revisited quarterly, and changed openly rather than by drift.
Overflow capacity
We take the volume so your person gets their projects back. The work that has been on their list for a year is usually the work that would have made the most difference.
After-hours and weekend cover
One person cannot be on call permanently, and pretending otherwise is how you lose them. Nights, weekends and holidays are covered by a rota that has your documentation.
Specialist skills on call
Security, identity, cloud migration, networking design. The work that is real but too infrequent to justify a hire.
Tooling they can use
Monitoring, documentation and security tooling your person has direct access to. If we leave, they keep working; if they leave, we keep working.
Escalation in both directions
They escalate to us, we escalate to them. It is a peer relationship, and it stops being one the moment either side starts filing tickets about the other.
Documentation discipline
When one person carries everything, documentation is the first casualty. We keep it current, which is mostly a matter of doing it every time rather than heroically once a year.
Quarterly review
Your IT lead, us, and whoever holds the budget. What broke, what it cost, what changes.
The part that decides whether this works
Every co-managed arrangement we have seen fail has failed for the same reason: the internal person believed, correctly or not, that the provider was auditioning for their job. Once that suspicion exists, information stops flowing, and a co-managed model without candid information is worse than either option on its own.
So we do the unglamorous thing. The split of duties is written before we touch anything, your person is in the room when it is written, and they hold the pen on their half. We do not report on them, we do not have a separate channel to their manager, and we do not quote for taking over their work unless you ask us to.
What usually happens after six months is that the internal role changes shape rather than disappearing. The person who used to spend their week resetting passwords starts owning the systems that actually decide how the business runs, which is both a better job and considerably harder to replace.
Whether this is the right service for you
This is usually the right shape when
- An internal IT lead who is capable but outnumbered
- A team that has grown past what one person can cover alone
- Nights, weekends and holidays currently resting on one phone
- Projects that never start because the queue never clears
We would point you elsewhere if
- Nobody internal at all — fully managed is the simpler answer
- An internal team already large enough to run its own rota
- A wish to replace someone without saying so, which we would rather not be part of
Questions about co-managed it
Is this a step towards replacing our IT person?
Who do staff call when something breaks?
What happens if our IT person leaves?
Can we start co-managed and move to fully managed later?
Start with a free IT assessment
Thirty minutes on a call, then a written picture of what you are running, where you are exposed, and what supporting it properly should cost per month. No obligation, and the document is yours to keep either way.