Hiring extra hands and handing over delivery solve different problems. How to tell which one you have, and how an engagement with Antdragon actually runs.
In short
If you already manage software work well and simply need more people, you are looking for extra developers. If you need someone to understand the problem, agree priorities with you, coordinate the work and keep delivery visible, you are looking for managed delivery. Our engagements are built the second way.
“Can you give us two developers?” is one of the most common first messages we receive. Sometimes that really is the need. More often, the business has a delivery problem, and extra developers would only make the same problem bigger.
It is worth working out which one you have before you commit to either.
With extra developers, you are adding people to a team you run. You set the priorities, write or approve the specifications, review the work and decide what ships. The people you add are productive only as far as your own management of the work allows.
With managed delivery, you hand over the running of the work itself. The team takes responsibility for understanding the problem, planning and coordinating the work, reviewing it as it moves and reporting what moved and what is blocked. You keep the business decisions, the priorities and acceptance.
| Extra developers | Managed delivery | |
|---|---|---|
| Who plans and coordinates the work | Your team | The delivery team |
| Who decides priorities and accepts the work | Your team | Your team |
| What you are paying for | People’s time | An agreed area of work moving forward |
| Works best when | You already have a technical lead and a clear process | You need the work run for you, with visibility |
Extra developers work well for a company with a strong technical lead, a settled process and more work than people. If that is not you, adding people tends to add coordination problems, not progress.
Our engagements are built around delivery, not headcount. Whatever the size of the work, the same few habits apply.
We understand the work first. Before building anything, we look at the system, the people using it and the business problem behind the request. Sometimes the problem worth solving is not the one in the first message.
One active priority, with one owner. Each active piece of work has a clear result, a named decision owner on your side, the access and data it needs, and an agreed way to check whether it works. Work that has no owner pauses rather than drifting.
Delivery stays visible. Work is released in small parts you can check. On System Improvement and Managed Delivery, a written update every Monday covers what moved, what is ready for you to check, what is waiting on you and what comes next.
Someone answers for progress. On our side, the delivery lead is responsible for moving the active priority forward, and for raising anything that blocks it, what it affects and the decisions needed, in writing.
The full sequence, from first conversation to handover, is on our how we work page.
The second question is how the work is shaped commercially.
Ongoing, monthly engagements suit work that keeps coming: a live system to look after, a queue of improvements, or a larger backlog that needs steady movement. Software Care, Advisory, System Improvement and Managed Delivery work this way.
One-off, fixed-scope work suits a piece of work with a clear boundary: one decision, one investigation, one problem or one defined project. Decision Review, System Review, Fix Sprint and Custom Project work this way.
A steady rhythm adds up. For TCE Baby, we shipped more than 72 releases across customer, merchant, web, back-office, payment, ecommerce and API work, while the expos kept running.
Managed delivery does not mean hands-off for you. It works when your side provides:
With those in place, you spend your time on decisions rather than on managing developers.
Founder and Managing Director, Antdragon
Rosaan started Antdragon in 2020 to be the team that stays accountable once software goes live, and works with business owners on the systems they rely on every day.
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