Rapidly Scale Your Dynamics 365 Team: Staff Augmentation and Subcontracting
For the partner who has won the work and cannot staff it, for the team whose senior Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement lead is leaving in three weeks, and for the CTO who has been trying to hire senior Dynamics developers for months.
If you have an awarded Dynamics 365 project and a resourcing gap that starts now, or a senior role you have failed to fill for months, this is how Solzet closes it. We provide senior Customer Engagement and Power Platform consultants into your delivery team in two ways: white label, under your brand as a subcontractor, or directly, as augmented capacity inside your own team. The people are senior only, certified, and the ones on the first call are the ones who do the work. Vetting is compressed by talking to engineers instead of a sales layer, by standard contracting paperwork, and by an optional fixed-price pilot on your backlog before you commit to a quarter.
What is the short answer?
- What you get. Named senior consultants in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights, plus Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, plugins, integrations and PCF controls. Certifications across the team include PL-200, PL-400 and PL-600 on the Power Platform and MB-210, MB-230 and MB-240 on Dynamics 365. No juniors placed behind a senior profile.
- How they join. White label as a subcontractor, working under your brand, your email and your documentation templates in front of your end client. Or directly as staff augmentation inside your own team, in your Azure DevOps or GitHub, your Teams channels, your definition of done. The commercial relationship stays business to business either way.
- How fast. The parts we control are measured in days: a technical call with the engineer who would do the work, named profiles against your role brief, a mutual NDA and a data processing agreement from standard templates, and a small first work package that can start while the wider agreement is still being papered. The parts you control, tenant access, licences, your own security review and any end client approval your prime contract requires, are usually what set the real start date.
- What we will not do. Tell you a senior Customer Engagement lead is sitting idle waiting for your call. We assemble delivery pods from a network of senior Microsoft specialists rather than carrying a large idle bench. If the right person is mid engagement we say so on the first call and tell you when they free up, instead of substituting somebody weaker and hoping you do not notice.
If what you need is the contracting model in full, the white label boundary, the minimums and the intellectual property terms, that lives on our Dynamics 365 subcontracting and white label service page. This page is about the week you are in now.
Which four situations make Dynamics 365 staffing urgent?
Nobody searches for staff augmentation in the abstract. These are the four versions of the problem we are actually called about, and the right engagement shape is different in each one.
You won the deal and the bench is already committed
A Microsoft partner signs two implementations in the same month and has the consultants for one of them. Turning the second one down costs the revenue and the relationship, so the delivery gap gets filled from outside. This is the most common reason partners come to us, and it is the case white label subcontracting exists for: our consultants appear to your end client as members of your team, and the client sees your brand throughout.
Your lead has resigned in the middle of a build
The person who held the data model, the security roles and the reasoning behind half the configuration is leaving in three weeks. Recruiting a permanent replacement takes a quarter you do not have, and a contractor who needs six weeks to understand the solution is not a replacement either. What you need is somebody senior enough to read an existing Dataverse solution, the plugin registrations and the environment strategy, and be useful in the first sprint.
The go live moved and the plan no longer fits the team
A date got pulled forward, a phase two became phase one, or discovery found twice the integration work anybody scoped. The team is not wrong, it is simply the wrong size for the new plan. Adding capacity to specific workstreams, integrations, migration, custom controls, is usually cheaper and faster than renegotiating the date, and it is easier to unwind afterwards.
One phase needs a skill nobody in the team has
The build is fine until the requirement lands that needs TypeScript and React inside a model driven app, a plugin that has to behave correctly under a bulk import, or an integration with real transaction volume. Hiring permanently for one phase does not pay back. This is the shape of the engagement in our case study with a UK Microsoft Solutions Partner, where two of our senior developers delivered eight custom PCF controls inside their delivery team over three months.
The wider argument about why partners subcontract at all, and how to structure it so it protects margin and the client relationship, is in our post on why Microsoft partners subcontract D365 work.
Why has hiring senior Dynamics 365 developers taken months?
There is a fifth situation, and it is slower than the other four. The requisition for two senior Customer Engagement, Dataverse or PCF developers has been open for months, the shortlist keeps collapsing at the technical interview, and the delivery date has not moved. That is rarely bad luck or a weak recruiter. It is the shape of this market, and these are the reasons it stalls.
The role you advertised is three jobs
A typical requisition asks for a Customer Engagement functional lead, a C# plugin and Dataverse developer, a TypeScript and React PCF engineer and somebody who owns solution ALM, in one person. People who genuinely cover all four exist, but they are few, they are rarely looking, and when they are they have several offers. Splitting the requisition helps, but it also doubles the search.
The senior people are already inside long engagements
Experienced Customer Engagement people tend to sit in multi year programmes at partners or end clients, and they move when a programme ends rather than when your job advert goes live. The candidates who are available on your timeline are disproportionately the ones between shorter contracts, which is a different population from the one your role brief describes.
CVs and keyword screens cannot tell senior from exposed
Dynamics 365, Dataverse, plugins and PCF all look the same on a CV whether somebody designed a security model or configured forms on a project that had one. Certifications prove an exam was passed. A keyword screen passes both profiles, the gap shows up in the final technical interview or in the first month, and the search starts again from the top.
Nobody in house can run the technical interview
If you already had a senior Customer Engagement person to assess candidates, you might not need the hire. Without one, interviews lean on general engineering questions that a strong .NET or React developer passes without ever having registered a plugin step or shipped a managed solution, which is how the wrong hire gets made after months of waiting for the right one.
Your project is the less attractive offer
An in flight build somebody else designed, a migration from a system nobody fully understands, or a solution with unmanaged customisations in production is harder work than a greenfield contract. Senior contractors with a choice tend to take the cleaner brief, so the harder your situation, the longer the requisition stays open.
Success still comes with a notice period and a ramp
Even a successful search ends with an offer, a notice period at the current employer, and then weeks of learning your environments, your solution layers and your integrations. The months already spent searching are not the whole delay, and a delivery date that was set when the requisition opened usually does not survive all three.
How do freelancers, recruiters, agencies and a senior consultancy compare on time to productive work and continuity?
The question that matters after months of searching is not who can send a CV fastest. It is how long until somebody is doing useful work on your solution, and what happens to that knowledge when they leave. The comparison is qualitative on purpose: we do not publish time to hire figures we cannot evidence for your market, and each row says where that route genuinely wins, including the ones that are not us.
| Route | Time to productive work | Continuity | Where it wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance marketplace or curated freelance network | Fast to contract once you find the right profile. Productive work depends entirely on whether this individual has shipped Customer Engagement, Dataverse or PCF work before, which you have to establish yourself. Curated networks screen for general engineering ability, so ask whether that screening covered plugins, solution layering and ALM specifically. | One person. If they take a better contract, the knowledge leaves with them unless you enforced documentation and your own repository from the first day. Replacing them restarts the search. | The work is small, tightly specified and self contained, such as a single control or a defined defect, and you have somebody in house who can review it. |
| Specialist recruiter, permanent or contract placement | The slowest route to productive work: search, interviews, offer, notice period, then the ramp on your solution. The recruiter delivers a candidate rather than delivery, and the technical assessment is still yours. | The best long term continuity when the hire is right and stays. Any replacement clause covers finding another candidate, not the delivery time lost, and a single hire is a single point of failure until the team around them grows. | You need permanent in house capability over years, the delivery date can absorb the search, and you can assess a senior Customer Engagement candidate properly. |
| Generic software or IT services agency | Quick to assign people, often slower to productive work on this stack, because the assigned developers may be capable .NET or web engineers learning Dataverse, plugin pipelines and model driven apps on your project. | Depends on the bench. People are rotated between clients as priorities change, so ask whether named people are contractually fixed or only proposed. | Most of the work sits outside Dynamics 365, such as a web portal on a separate stack or a general integration layer, with only a thin Dataverse edge. |
| Senior Dynamics 365 and Power Platform consultancy retained with flexible capacity | Named people who have delivered on this stack start with a first work package as soon as access exists, and begin by reading what is already deployed, so useful output arrives in the first sprint rather than after a ramp. Your security review and provisioning still set the start date. | Designed in rather than hoped for: work in your repository, a runbook as a deliverable, a second senior person reviewing the work, and capacity that flexes up or down on notice rather than disappearing. | The delivery date is fixed, the gap is senior and stack specific, and you want capacity now while keeping the option to hire permanently later with a documented solution to hand over. |
The routes are not exclusive. The pattern that usually protects a delivery date is to keep the permanent search open, retain senior capacity for the work that cannot wait, and write the handover to your eventual hire into that engagement from the first day.
If the gap is a PCF developer specifically, the marketplace against dedicated team trade, with the screening questions, is covered in hire PCF developers: in house team against Upwork or Toptal freelancers. If you want a developer for a defined build rather than capacity inside your team, see our Dynamics 365 developer and consulting service. And if the months of searching have raised the question of whether you need senior Dynamics help at all, the consultant against do it yourself decision guide names the points where configuration by your own makers runs out.
Which contract terms protect you when you retain capacity instead of hiring?
The fear that keeps a failed requisition open is dependency: that retained consultants become the only people who understand the solution. The answer is not trust, it is seven terms in the statement of work. Ask any supplier for them, including us.
Named seniors, written into the statement of work
The consultants are named before signature, you can interview them, and any change of person needs your written agreement. This removes the most common way retained capacity disappoints, which is a strong profile at the sales stage and somebody else on the first morning.
All work in your environments and your repository
Guest accounts in your tenant that you create and can revoke, code and configuration in your Azure DevOps or GitHub through your pull request process, and intellectual property assigned as the statement of work defines. Nothing that matters exists only on the supplier side, so the relationship can end without taking the solution with it.
A runbook as a named deliverable, not a courtesy
How environments and solutions are laid out, how a release reaches production, which plugins, flows and integrations are registered where, where configuration and secrets are held without the secrets themselves, and the known issues. Accepted like any other deliverable and kept current as the work changes, so the solution is operable by somebody who was never on the project.
Knowledge transfer as an obligation
Your people in the pull requests, design decisions written down as they are made, walkthroughs of the parts that are not obvious from the code, and pairing time with your permanent hire when they finally arrive. Written into the scope so it is not the first thing cut when a sprint runs tight.
Exit assistance defined on day one
A notice period that lets you scale down without an argument, and a handover period in which the outgoing consultants brief your team, your new hire or another supplier. Agreeing the exit at the start is what makes retained capacity flexible rather than a dependency you cannot unwind.
No single point of failure
A lead role is not one person working alone. The work is reviewed by a second senior person in the delivery pod, so more than one person understands the solution, and together with the runbook and your repository that means an illness, a holiday or a departure is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
A ramp you can measure rather than a promise
The first work package has a written read of what is actually deployed early on and a reviewable deliverable with acceptance criteria. If the consultant is not productive on your solution, it shows in weeks, and the package boundary is a natural point to stop without penalty or renegotiation.
How does a paid live pairing task separate a senior consultant from a CV?
Months of interviews fail on this stack because a CV and a general technical interview cannot show how somebody behaves inside a real Dataverse solution. A paid live pairing task on your own environment can. It works for a contractor, an agency candidate or the consultant we propose, and we are happy to run it before a longer engagement.
- 1
Pick a real item from your backlog
Something small and genuinely unsolved: a plugin that misbehaves under bulk updates, a flow that fails intermittently, a form script that should become a business rule or a control, a PCF control defect, a slow view. Not a puzzle written for the interview.
- 2
Run it in a development or sandbox environment
A guest account with the security role the task needs and a copy of the solution. No production access, and nothing the candidate needs that a real new starter would not also get.
- 3
Pair live with your own developer or architect
A few hours on a shared screen, with your person asking why at each step. If nobody in house can judge the technical depth, bring in an architect you trust for the session, or judge on what gets written down at the end.
- 4
Pay for it
It is real work on your system and you keep whatever it produces. A paid session is also one a senior person will make time for, while an unpaid take home test is usually declined by exactly the people you want.
- 5
Watch the process more than the result
A senior consultant reads the solution layers and existing registrations before changing anything, asks which solutions are managed or unmanaged in each environment and how releases reach production, says plainly when they need to check something rather than bluffing, and writes down what they found. A CV cannot show you any of that, and a single session shows you all of it.
If the pairing session goes well, the natural next step is the fixed price pilot work package described below, which turns one session of evidence into a few weeks of it before either side commits to a quarter.
What are the two ways the same people join your team?
The consultants, the rates and the legal terms are identical across both. The only question is whose brand faces the end client.
White label subcontracting, under your brand
For Microsoft partners and systems integrators. Our consultants use your email addresses and your communication channels, deliverables and documentation carry your branding, they join client meetings as members of your team, and your end clients do not appear on their public profiles. The commercial relationship is between your organisation and Solzet only: you bill your client at your rates and you pay us at ours. You keep the client relationship, the accountability and the margin, and you take on work you would otherwise have to decline. The full contracting model, the minimums and the intellectual property terms are on our Dynamics 365 subcontracting page.
Direct staff augmentation, inside your own team
For organisations running Dynamics 365 themselves. Our consultants join your team under their own names, work in your Azure DevOps or GitHub, your Teams channels and your environments, attend your standups and sprint reviews, and are managed by your delivery lead against your definition of done. You are adding senior capacity to your own effort rather than outsourcing a deliverable, so the direction stays with you. Where you would rather hand over a defined outcome instead of a seat, we scope it as a fixed price work package instead.
Which Dynamics 365 roles are we asked for?
Listed in the order they turn up as urgent gaps rather than alphabetically. Every one of them sits inside Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and the Power Platform, which is the only thing we do, and which is why a consultant can be useful in your first sprint rather than your fourth.
Senior Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement lead
The role behind most urgent requests. Owns the functional design and the technical shape of a Customer Engagement build: the Dataverse data model, security roles and business units, the model driven apps, business process flows, the boundary between configuration and code, and the environment and solution strategy. Runs workshops with the business, writes the design decisions down, reviews what the rest of the team builds, and is senior enough to say no to a requirement that will cost more than it returns. On a rescue this is the person who reads what is already deployed before anybody writes new code.
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement functional consultant
Configures and documents Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights on Dataverse: entities and relationships, forms and views, business rules, queues and routing, service level agreements, work orders and scheduling, journeys and segments. Runs requirement workshops, writes user stories against the actual configuration, and handles user acceptance testing and the training that follows. Certifications on the team include MB-210, MB-230, MB-240 and PL-200.
Dataverse and plugin developer
The code side of a Customer Engagement build. Plugins and custom APIs in C#, asynchronous workflow activities, server side logic that has to stay correct under a bulk data load, and the performance work that follows when a synchronous step lands in the wrong pipeline stage. Also the person who knows why a rollup field, a calculated column, a business rule and a plugin are four different answers to what looks like one requirement. Typically PL-400 certified.
PCF and front end engineer
Custom PowerApps Component Framework controls in TypeScript and React, packaged as managed solutions, tested across browsers, documented for whoever maintains them next. This is a scarce skill inside most Dynamics teams and one of the most common single skill gaps we are called for. Our documented delivery of this shape is eight controls for a UK Microsoft Solutions Partner, built inside their Azure DevOps with their pull request review process.
Power Platform and integration engineer
Power Automate flows that survive contact with production, Power Apps canvas and model driven work, Power Pages portals, and the integrations that connect Dynamics 365 to the rest of the estate through Dataverse APIs, custom connectors, service bus and webhooks. Includes the unglamorous half of the job: error handling, retries, idempotency, and knowing what happens to the flow when the upstream system is down for an hour.
Solution architect
For a programme rather than a project. Environment and licensing strategy, tenant design, the application lifecycle management pipeline, integration architecture, data migration approach, and the governance that keeps a growing Power Platform estate from becoming unsupportable. PL-600 certified. Often engaged part time alongside a full time lead rather than as a full seat.
Application lifecycle and environment engineer
Solution based deployment with the Power Platform command line interface and Azure DevOps or GitHub pipelines, managed solution layering, environment strategy from development through test to production, and the discipline that stops manual export and import from quietly becoming your release process. Frequently the first thing an incoming lead asks for on a project that has been running without it.
Full-stack custom CRM engineer
For partners and teams delivering CRM outside the Microsoft stack, typically to a client who needs CRM capability without Microsoft licensing. React and TypeScript on the front end, Node.js or .NET services, PostgreSQL data models, authentication, role based access, and the integrations and migration that any CRM needs. The same delivery discipline applies as on a Dynamics 365 build: code in your repository, reviewed through your pull request process, documented for whoever maintains it next.
Support and hypercare consultant
For the weeks after a go live, when the build team is being released and the issues are arriving. Triage, fixes, small enhancements, release wave updates, and the day to day user support that otherwise lands on the one person who cannot afford the interruption. Runs at part time capacity from around twenty hours a month upward.
If the gap is specifically a PCF developer and you are weighing a freelance marketplace against a dedicated team, that comparison is made in full in hire PCF developers: in house team against freelancers. If you are building a lasting Power Platform capability rather than covering a phase, read building a Power Apps centre of excellence with a nearshore team.
How does onboarding run when the start date is now?
Eight steps, and the useful thing about them is which ones we control. Steps one, two, three, six and seven are ours and move in days. Step four moves in days if your legal team is working from a redline rather than a blank page. Step five is yours, and it is usually the one that sets the real start date, which is why it should begin on day one rather than after signature.
- 1
Send the role brief, not a request for a capability deck
Tell us which apps are involved, what stage the build is at, which roles are missing, what the start date and the end date look like, and whether the work is white label under your brand or direct inside your own team. If you have a statement of work or a backlog, that is better than a job description. What we do not need is a discovery call to establish whether we do Dynamics 365, and what you should not need is a two week qualification process before you speak to anybody technical.
- 2
Talk to the engineer, not to a sales layer
The first call is with a consultant who would be on the engagement, and it goes both ways. We ask what is actually deployed, what the environment and solution strategy looks like, what the integration surface is, and where the project is genuinely stuck. You ask whatever you need to judge whether this person can hold your build. If the fit is wrong, that call is where it should end, and we would rather it ended there than after a month of paperwork.
- 3
Get named profiles against the brief, with the constraints stated
We come back with the specific people we would put on it, their Dynamics 365 and Power Platform background, their certifications, and their real availability including anything they are still finishing. If a role cannot be filled at the seniority you asked for by the date you asked for, that is in the same message rather than discovered in week three. You can interview anybody proposed, and the person you interview is the person who starts.
- 4
Paper it from standard templates, in parallel with everything else
A mutual non disclosure agreement, a business to business services agreement, a GDPR compliant data processing agreement, and a statement of work that defines scope, rates, invoicing, intellectual property ownership, confidentiality and non solicitation. We work from standard templates that have been through other buyers legal reviews, so the usual path is a redline rather than a drafting exercise. Contracting runs alongside the technical steps rather than blocking them.
- 5
Provision least privilege access to the environments
Our consultants work in your tenant, through guest accounts you create and can revoke, with the security roles the work actually needs and multi factor authentication and conditional access as your policy requires. We do not need production access to start on most workstreams: a development environment, the solution, and read access to the backlog is enough for the first days. This is the step that most often sets the true start date, so start it early and in parallel.
- 6
Run a first work package that produces something reviewable
The first commitment does not have to be a quarter. A scoped work package, a set of controls, a migration slice, a workstream in the backlog, priced fixed or as a short time and materials block, gives you a deliverable to judge in weeks rather than a reference to trust. It also surfaces the things that only show up in real work: how your review process feels from the inside, whether the environments are as documented, and whether our estimates hold on your codebase.
- 7
Ramp on the existing solution instead of waiting to be briefed
A senior person joining an in flight Dynamics build should not be idle waiting for documentation. In the first days we read the solution layers and what is unmanaged in production, the plugin and flow registrations, the security model, the integration endpoints, the backlog and the open defects, and we come back with what we found, including the parts that contradict the documentation. That read is useful to you even if the engagement stops there.
- 8
Set the review rhythm and the exit conditions on day one
Your standups, your sprint reviews, your definition of done, your repository, your pull request process. We also agree at the start what handover looks like at the end: code in your repository, documentation in your format, decisions written down, and a notice period that lets you unwind capacity without an argument. Augmentation that cannot be reversed cleanly is not flexibility, it is a dependency.
Which weeks of vendor vetting are real?
A standard supplier onboarding takes six weeks because of eight separate steps, and only some of them protect you. The table separates the ones worth keeping from the ones that exist because that is how the process was drawn. We are honest in it about the two rows we cannot shorten at all.
| Step | Why it normally takes weeks | What happens here instead |
|---|---|---|
| Qualification and discovery calls | Two or three meetings with account managers before anybody technical appears, each one re establishing facts the previous one already covered. | The first call is technical and it is with somebody who would be on the engagement. There is no separate qualification stage to get through. |
| Capability and reference checking | A capability deck, a reference programme, and a set of case studies that describe outcomes without describing the work. | A published case study of the same engagement shape, a technical conversation deep enough to expose whether the person has done this before, and a first work package that shows you the work itself. |
| Profile submission and interviews | Anonymised profiles, then a substitution at the point of contract, then interviews with people who may or may not be the ones assigned. | Named people with their real availability, interviewed by you if you want, and the person you interview is the person who starts. No substitutions after signature without your agreement. |
| Master agreement negotiation | A bespoke master services agreement drafted from scratch and passed between two legal teams for weeks while the delivery date does not move. | Standard business to business templates covering the non disclosure agreement, the data processing agreement, intellectual property, confidentiality and non solicitation. Usually a redline rather than a draft, and it runs in parallel with the technical steps. |
| Your security and vendor risk review | A questionnaire, a review board, and a queue. Genuinely necessary, and entirely inside your organisation. | We cannot shorten this one, but we can start it on day one instead of week three, and we answer the questionnaire from documents we already maintain. Where a review board has a fixed cadence, that date is usually the real start date. |
| Tenant access, accounts and licences | Guest accounts, security roles and licence assignment handled by a team that has other priorities, discovered as a blocker on the first morning. | We send the exact access list at the point of the role brief so provisioning can run alongside contracting. Most workstreams can start in a development environment without production access. |
| End client approval of a subcontractor | Buried in a prime contract clause and found late, then handled as an exception under time pressure. | We raise it at the start, because it is a common clause. Our default posture is white label and invisible, and we will sign whatever confidentiality and non solicitation terms your client contract obliges you to pass down. |
| Knowledge transfer into the existing build | A month of shadowing before the new person produces anything, priced as productive time. | A senior consultant reads the solution, the registrations, the security model and the backlog directly, and reports what is actually deployed. Useful output in the first days rather than after the handover meetings. |
The honest summary of that table is that we can compress our half of the process to days, and that your security review, your provisioning queue and any end client approval clause are what actually decide when somebody starts. A supplier who quotes you a start date without asking about those three has not thought about your organisation at all.
What can two weeks honestly deliver when you need senior Dynamics CE consultants onsite?
Two weeks is enough to name senior people and usually enough to start them remotely. It is rarely enough to recruit anybody, and an onsite requirement narrows the field further. A senior consultancy can mobilise named consultants quickly; a recruitment process cannot. Compress the decision safely: a one page scope, a paid two day assessment that doubles as the vetting, access and security prerequisites sorted in parallel, and a start conditional on what the assessment finds rather than on a promise. Then protect yourself in the contract: named individuals, daily reporting in week one, and a defined exit if the fit is wrong.
On onsite presence we are direct. Solzet delivers remotely from Yerevan, Armenia. Onsite time is arranged as defined visits for specific periods once visas, travel and the named consultant availability are confirmed, so it is not something we promise inside two weeks. What two weeks usually allows is a remote start in your tenant and channels, with visits planned at the points where being in the room matters.
- 1
A one page scope, written the day you call
Which apps and environments are involved, the workstream the consultants will own, the deliverable your client penalty attaches to, the date that matters, whether the work is white label or direct, and whether onsite presence is a contractual requirement or a preference. One page is enough to name people against and to start access requests. A longer document at this point costs days you do not have.
- 2
A paid two day assessment that doubles as the vetting
The senior consultant you would retain spends roughly two working days inside your solution: the solution layers and what is unmanaged in production, plugin and flow registrations, the security model, integrations, the backlog and the open defects. The output is a written read of what is deployed, the risks to your date, and a proposed first work package. You judge the person on real work on your system instead of a CV, and you keep the findings whatever you decide next.
- 3
Access and security prerequisites in parallel, from the first day
We send the exact access list with the scope: guest accounts, the security roles the assessment needs, a development or sandbox environment, read access to the repository and backlog, and any vendor risk questionnaire. Your identity team, your security review and any end client approval of a subcontractor run alongside the paperwork, because those queues, not our side, usually decide whether anything starts inside two weeks.
- 4
A start conditional on the assessment output, not on a promise
The statement of work for the delivery phase is drafted while the assessment runs and signed against what it found. If the assessment shows the plan is achievable with the people proposed, work starts on the first work package. If it shows the date is not achievable, or that the real problem is a failing design rather than missing capacity, you learn that before committing a quarter, which is worth more under penalties than an optimistic start.
- 5
Onsite presence agreed as defined visits once the basics are confirmed
Where onsite time genuinely matters, typically kickoff workshops, a design authority session, user acceptance testing or go live support, it is planned as specific visits for defined periods once visa requirements, travel and the named consultant availability are confirmed. Until then the consultants work remotely in your tenant and your channels, which is what a two week start usually looks like in practice.
What onsite presence can be committed from Yerevan, and what cannot
| Topic | What we can commit | What we cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Remote start | Named senior consultants working in your tenant, your repository and your Teams channels as soon as access exists and the paperwork is signed, inside your working day. | Start before your access, security review and any end client subcontractor approval are complete. |
| Onsite visits | Defined onsite periods by arrangement, for workshops, design sessions, testing or go live, planned once visas, travel and consultant availability are confirmed. | Guarantee anybody physically on your site within two weeks of a first call, or promise a travel date before those constraints are checked. |
| Continuous presence | A regular rhythm of remote collaboration with planned visits at the points where being in the room genuinely changes the outcome. | Full time, continuous onsite staffing for the length of an engagement. |
| Clearance and jurisdiction | Work under your confidentiality, data processing and access policies, with client data staying in your tenant. | National security clearance in your country, or delivery that must come from a named jurisdiction. |
If your prime contract makes continuous onsite presence a hard requirement from the first week, say so on the first call and we will tell you plainly that another supplier is the better route for that part of the work.
Which contract terms protect you when your own client contract carries penalties?
Speed and a penalty clause together are where buyers sign terms they later regret. These six are specific to that week, and they sit on top of the retained capacity terms above rather than replacing them.
Named individuals, with substitution only by your written consent
The people who ran the assessment are the people named in the statement of work. Under a client penalty, the risk you cannot absorb is a strong profile at signature and a different person on the first morning, so make substitution a term rather than a courtesy.
Daily reporting in week one
A short written report each working day of the first week: what was done, what is blocked, which access or decision is outstanding, and what changes the risk to your date. After week one it relaxes to your normal sprint rhythm. It gives your delivery lead evidence early, and evidence is what you will need if your own client asks why a date moved.
A defined exit if the fit is wrong
An exit point at the end of the assessment and again at the end of the first work package, with a short notice period and a handover of whatever was produced. If the fit is wrong, you want to stop cleanly in week two, not argue about it in month three.
Obligations tied to what the supplier actually controls
Passing your client penalty clause through to a subcontractor unchanged rarely holds, because the subcontractor controls only part of the delivery: not your client decisions, not your access queue, not the scope your prime contract fixed. What protects you is obligations on what the supplier does control, named people, reporting, deliverables accepted against written criteria and the quality of the work, with liability agreed case by case in the statement of work.
Onsite commitments written as visits, not as presence
If onsite time is part of the deal, write it as defined visits with agreed purposes, confirmed once visas and travel are arranged, rather than as a general promise of presence. A promise nobody can keep inside two weeks is a liability for both sides when your client asks for it.
Pass down terms agreed before access
Confidentiality, data processing, non solicitation and any subcontractor approval your client contract requires, signed before anybody touches the tenant. The full white label contracting model, including who signs which statement of work, is on our subcontracting service page.
Who signs which statement of work, how substitution and pass down terms are written, and how intellectual property moves at acceptance are covered on our Dynamics 365 subcontracting and white label service page. If the assessment shows a failing build rather than a staffing gap, the next step is a rescue and takeover, not more seats.
Which engagement models are there, and how does the fixed price pilot work?
Three models, and the third one is the answer to the hardest problem in urgent staffing: how do you commit to a supplier you have known for a week. A fixed price work package scoped as a pilot gives you a deliverable to judge instead of a reference to trust, and it converts into either of the other two models afterwards without renegotiating the legal framework.
| Model | Best for | Typical minimum | How it is billed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated resource | A named consultant on your project for a defined period, typically three to twelve months. Continuity, deep context and predictable capacity, which is what a lead role needs. | Around three months at half time, eighty hours a month. | Monthly, against an agreed monthly capacity. |
| Time and materials | Ongoing support, defect work, enhancement backlogs and workstreams whose size is not yet known. Capacity flexes month to month. | No strict minimum, though we recommend at least forty hours a month so context is not lost between engagements. | Tracked and invoiced monthly against actual hours. |
| Fixed price work package | A defined deliverable: a set of PCF controls, a migration slice, an automation pack, a module configuration. Also the cheapest way to test a supplier before committing a quarter. | Whatever the deliverable is, once the scope is clear enough to price. | Fixed price against agreed acceptance criteria, invoiced on milestones. |
A pilot team is simply the smallest useful version of the pod: usually one senior consultant who owns the design conversation plus one developer, on a scope both sides can describe in a paragraph. If you are still weighing whether to run the work internally instead, our consultant against do it yourself decision guide costs the line items and is honest about when the internal route wins.
Which eight questions let you vet us properly in one call?
Compressing a vetting cycle is not the same as skipping it. These eight questions get you most of the way in forty five minutes, they work on any Dynamics 365 supplier and not just this one, and every one of them is a question we would rather be asked early than late.
Is the person on this call the person who will do the work?
The single most useful question in urgent staffing. It separates a delivery team from a sales pipeline, and the answer is easy to verify in the next five minutes by asking something technical.
Can I interview the named consultant, and will they be the one who starts?
Profile substitution after signature is the classic failure of urgent staffing. Ask for the commitment explicitly and have it written into the statement of work.
What is the seniority floor, and who reviews their work?
A senior profile with a junior behind it is the other classic failure. Ask who does code and configuration review, and what happens when the consultant hits something outside their depth.
What can you actually start without production access?
Tests whether the supplier has thought about your provisioning queue at all. A supplier who cannot answer this will be idle and billing while your identity team works through its backlog.
Who owns the code and the documentation, and where does it live?
It should be your repository, your intellectual property, and your documentation format, stated in the statement of work rather than assumed. If the work only exists on the supplier side, you have bought a dependency.
What happens to the knowledge when the engagement ends?
Ask for the handover shape up front: written decisions, documented solution, a named person on your side who has been in the pull requests. Augmentation without handover quietly becomes a permanent cost.
What is the notice period, and how do I scale down?
Flexibility is the reason to augment rather than hire. If the exit terms are punitive, you have taken on the cost of a permanent hire without any of the benefits.
What are you not good at?
A supplier who has no answer has either not thought about it or is willing to say anything. Ours is on this page, in the section on where we are the wrong answer.
What goes wrong in urgent staffing, and what do we do about it?
If you have bought capacity under time pressure before, you have probably met at least two of these. They are worth naming, because the countermeasure for each one belongs in the statement of work rather than in a sentence on a website.
The profile and the person are not the same
A strong anonymised profile wins the contract and a weaker consultant arrives. Our answer is that the people are named before signature, you may interview them, and any change of person during the engagement needs your agreement. It is a term in the statement of work rather than a promise on a page.
Urgency is used to skip the boring paperwork
Under time pressure the non disclosure agreement, the data processing agreement, the intellectual property clause and the non solicitation terms get deferred and then forgotten, which is exactly the situation that hurts when something goes wrong. We paper the standard set before access is granted, in parallel with the technical steps, so speed does not cost you the protections.
Capacity arrives without direction and produces noise
Adding people to a project without a workstream to own produces coordination overhead rather than throughput. We ask what the added person owns end to end before they start, and if the honest answer is that nobody has decided, we would rather spend the first days on that than bill for attendance at your standups.
The knowledge leaves when the contractor does
The most expensive version of this is a build that only the departed contractor understood. Everything we write goes into your repository through your review process, decisions are written down as they are made, and handover is defined at the start rather than negotiated at the end.
The end client finds out through the back door
In a white label engagement, a consultant appearing on a public profile or emailing a client from the wrong address is a genuine commercial problem for a partner. Our default is your email, your templates, your brand, and end clients kept off our consultants public profiles, backed by the confidentiality terms in the agreement.
Who are you actually hiring?
Solzet is a CRM consultancy based in Yerevan, Armenia, working on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, the Power Platform, and custom-built CRM, founded in 2024 by senior practitioners with eight or more years each in the ecosystem. We implement Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights, build Power Apps, Power Automate and custom PCF controls, take over implementations that have stalled, and build custom CRM on React, Node.js, PostgreSQL and .NET for clients who need CRM without Microsoft licensing. Capacity is assembled into a delivery pod per engagement from a network of senior specialists rather than drawn from a standing bench, which is why we can put strong people on a project quickly and also why we will tell you when a specific person is not free.
Certifications across the team include PL-200, PL-400 and PL-600 on the Power Platform and MB-210, MB-230 and MB-240 on Dynamics 365. The team works in English, Armenian and Russian. Armenia is UTC+4 with no daylight saving, which leaves roughly four to six hours of daily overlap with Western European hours and six to eight with the UK and Ireland, enough for standups, pairing, sprint reviews and joint client workshops inside your working day.
Engagements are business to business: a services agreement, a mutual non disclosure agreement, a GDPR compliant data processing agreement, and a statement of work covering scope, rates, invoicing, intellectual property ownership, confidentiality and non solicitation. Our consultants work in your tenant through guest accounts you create and can revoke, with least privilege roles and whatever multi factor authentication and conditional access your policy requires. Client data stays in your tenant, and code goes into your repository through your review process.
The documented delivery of exactly this shape is our PCF controls development for a UK Microsoft partner, where two of our senior developers joined the partner delivery team white label for three months. For the broader picture of who we are and how we work, see the company profile and our Dynamics 365 consulting and development service.
When are we the wrong answer?
You are deciding under time pressure, so the fastest thing we can do is rule ourselves out early where we should be. There are five situations where hiring us would be a mistake, and we would say so on the first call rather than after the paperwork.
You need a Dynamics 365 product outside Customer Engagement
We work on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights, and on the Power Platform around them. If your gap is on the finance, supply chain or trade side of the Dynamics range, we are not the supplier for it and we will say so on the first call rather than sending a consultant to learn on your project.
You need people on site, or in a specific jurisdiction
Our consultants work from Yerevan. We join workshops, standups and client sessions over Teams, and that covers the great majority of Customer Engagement delivery. Defined onsite visits can be arranged for specific periods, subject to visas, travel and availability, but if your contract requires people physically on site continuously or within days, security clearance in your country, or delivery from a named jurisdiction, that is a hard constraint we cannot meet.
You need a large team assembled next week
We assemble pods from a network of senior specialists rather than carrying a large idle bench, so a handful of senior people at short notice is realistic and a team of fifteen next Monday is not. If that is genuinely the requirement, a staffing firm with a standing bench is a better call than us, and you should expect the seniority to vary across the group.
You want a body shop billing hours against a rate card
We are senior only and we ask questions about the design, which is the point of hiring at this level and occasionally an irritation if what you wanted was silent throughput. If the requirement is the cheapest hands that can follow a specification exactly, our rates will not be competitive against suppliers who staff it differently.
What you actually have is a failing project, not a staffing gap
Adding people to an implementation whose design is wrong makes it later, not earlier. If the real situation is a stalled or overrun build, the honest first step is a diagnostic and a scope reset rather than three more seats, and we would rather sell you that.
On that last one: if the project is stalled, overrun or has lost its partner, the honest first step is a health check and technical audit or a rescue and takeover, not three more seats on a plan that is not working.
What do buyers ask about Dynamics 365 staff augmentation?
We urgently need senior Dynamics 365 CE leads. How fast can Solzet actually start?
The steps on our side are measured in days rather than weeks: a technical call with the consultant who would take the role, named profiles with their real availability against your brief, and standard contracting templates covering the non disclosure agreement, the data processing agreement, intellectual property and non solicitation. In practice the start date is set by whichever of the following takes longest: your own security or vendor risk review, guest account and licence provisioning in your tenant, any end client approval your prime contract requires for a subcontractor, and the notice a specific consultant owes a current engagement. We tell you which of those is binding on the first call rather than quoting a start date we do not control, and we will not claim a senior Customer Engagement lead is sitting idle waiting for the phone to ring.
What is the difference between staff augmentation and white-label subcontracting here?
They are the same people under two different commercial arrangements. In white-label subcontracting you are a Microsoft partner or systems integrator, our consultants work under your brand and your email in front of your end client, and the contract is between your organisation and Solzet with no relationship between us and your client. In direct staff augmentation you are the organisation running Dynamics 365, and our consultants join your internal team under their own names, in your tooling, managed by your delivery lead. The engagement models, rates and legal terms are the same. Which one you pick depends on whose brand faces the end client. The contracting model in full is on our Dynamics 365 subcontracting page.
What does a senior Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement lead cover in your definition?
The functional and technical shape of a Customer Engagement build. The Dataverse data model, security roles and business units, model driven apps, business process flows, the boundary between configuration and code, and the environment and solution strategy. They run workshops with the business, write design decisions down, review what the rest of the team produces, and are senior enough to push back on a requirement that costs more than it returns. On an in flight or troubled project they start by reading what is actually deployed, the solution layers, the plugin and flow registrations, the security model and the integration points, before proposing anything new.
Can we test you on a small piece of work before committing to a full quarter?
Yes, and it is usually the fastest route through an urgent decision. We scope a defined deliverable as a fixed price work package, for example a set of PCF controls, a migration slice, an automation pack or one workstream from your backlog, with written acceptance criteria and milestone invoicing. You get something reviewable in weeks and a real view of how we work inside your review process, and we get a proper read on your environments and estimates before either side commits to a longer arrangement. If it goes well it converts to a dedicated resource or time and materials engagement without renegotiating the legal framework.
What is the minimum engagement, and how do we scale it back down?
For a dedicated consultant the practical minimum is around three months at half time, eighty hours a month, because a lead role needs continuity to be worth anything. Time and materials has no strict minimum, though we recommend at least forty hours a month so context is not lost between blocks. Fixed price work packages have no minimum beyond a scope clear enough to price. Scaling down is a notice period agreed in the statement of work, and we define handover at the start: code in your repository, documentation in your format, decisions written down. Augmentation you cannot reverse cleanly is a dependency rather than flexibility.
How do you protect our end client relationship if we are a Microsoft partner?
Our consultants use your email addresses and channels, deliverables and documentation carry your branding, they attend client meetings as members of your team, and your end clients do not appear on their public profiles. The commercial relationship exists only between your organisation and Solzet. Contractually that is backed by a mutual non disclosure agreement, a non solicitation clause, confidentiality terms we will match to whatever your client contract obliges you to pass down, and intellectual property assigned to your organisation or through to your end client as the statement of work defines. Our incentive is that you win the next deal, because that is where the next engagement comes from.
Which skills do you actually cover, and which do you not?
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, meaning Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights, along with Dataverse, model driven and canvas Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, plugins and custom APIs in C#, integrations, data migration, application lifecycle management with the Power Platform command line interface, and custom PCF controls in TypeScript and React. Certifications across the team include PL-200, PL-400, PL-600, MB-210, MB-230 and MB-240. Outside Microsoft, we also provide full-stack engineers for custom CRM work in React, Node.js, PostgreSQL and .NET. We do not cover the finance, supply chain or trade side of the Dynamics range, and we do not offer generic software development beyond CRM. The focus is why a consultant can be useful in your first sprint rather than your fourth.
How does the time zone work for daily collaboration?
Yerevan is UTC+4 with no daylight saving, which leaves roughly four to six hours of daily overlap with Western European hours and six to eight with the UK and Ireland. That is enough for daily standups, pairing, sprint reviews and joint client workshops inside your working day rather than handing work over as a recording. For clients in the United States the overlap is the European morning against the American start of day, which works for a daily sync and for asynchronous review, and we say so plainly rather than pretending it is the same as being in the next room.
What contracts and data protection terms apply?
Every engagement is business to business: a services agreement, a mutual non disclosure agreement, a GDPR compliant data processing agreement, and a statement of work defining scope, rates, invoicing, intellectual property ownership, confidentiality and non solicitation. Our consultants access your systems through guest accounts you create and can revoke, with least privilege security roles and whatever multi factor authentication and conditional access your policy requires. Client data stays in your tenant. Solzet is a registered Armenian company and we invoice in euros, dollars or pounds by international transfer.
Have you done this before, or is this a new service line?
It is a large share of what we do. The documented example on this site is a UK Microsoft Solutions Partner that won a Dynamics 365 implementation and had no in house TypeScript and React capacity for the eight custom PCF controls the project required. Two of our senior developers joined their delivery team white label for three months, worked in their Azure DevOps with their pull request review process, delivered all eight controls as documented managed solutions, and the partner engaged us again on later projects. The case study is on this site with the technical detail.
We have been trying to hire two senior Dynamics 365 developers for a year. Why is it this hard?
Because the requisition usually describes several scarce roles in one person: a Customer Engagement functional lead, a C# plugin and Dataverse developer, a TypeScript and React PCF engineer and an ALM owner. The senior people who cover that range tend to sit inside long programmes and move when those end, CVs and keyword screens cannot separate somebody who designed a Dataverse solution from somebody who worked near one, and without a senior person in house the technical interview cannot either. In flight builds and migrations are also less attractive to contractors with a choice than greenfield work. None of that is a failure of your recruiter. It is the shape of this market, which is why retaining senior capacity while you keep recruiting is often the faster way to protect the delivery date.
Should we use a freelance marketplace, a recruiter, a generic agency or a Dynamics 365 consultancy?
It depends on what you are protecting. A freelance marketplace or curated network is quick for a small, well specified piece of work you can review yourself, but continuity rests on one person. A specialist recruiter is the right route to permanent capability, and the slowest route to productive work, because search, notice period and ramp all come first. A generic agency assigns people quickly, but they may be learning Dataverse on your project. A senior Dynamics 365 and Power Platform consultancy retained with flexible capacity is strongest when the delivery date is fixed and the gap is stack specific, with continuity built in through your repository, a runbook and a second reviewer. It is not the cheapest route per hour, and it does not give you an employee at the end.
We cannot hire a senior Dynamics 365 CE developer and the migration is due in Q3. What should we do?
Stop making the migration date depend on the requisition. Keep recruiting, but retain senior capacity now for the migration itself: a first work package that reads the source data model and the target Dataverse design, then the mapping, the load approach for relationships, owners and history, and the rehearsal runs. Write handover to your eventual hire into the scope, so whoever you recruit inherits a documented solution and a runbook rather than a half finished migration. If the migration is out of Salesforce, our Salesforce to Dynamics 365 and Dataverse migration guide covers the technical sequence. If the scope itself is uncertain, a short health check or discovery before committing capacity is the cheaper first step.
What contract terms protect us if we retain a consultancy instead of hiring?
Ask for seven things in the statement of work. Named senior consultants, with no change of person without your written agreement. All work in your tenant and your repository, with intellectual property assigned as the statement of work defines. A runbook as a named deliverable, kept current. Knowledge transfer as an obligation, including pairing time with your permanent hire. Exit assistance: a notice period and a defined handover period. No single point of failure, meaning a second senior person reviews the work and understands the solution. And a first work package with acceptance criteria, so a ramp that is not working shows up in weeks and can be stopped at the package boundary. We work on those terms, and they are worth asking any supplier for.
How do we vet a senior Dynamics 365 consultant when nobody in house can assess them?
Run a paid live pairing task on your real environment instead of relying on the CV. Pick a small, genuinely unsolved backlog item, such as a plugin failing under bulk updates, an intermittent flow failure or a PCF control defect, give the consultant a guest account in a development or sandbox environment, and pair for a few hours with your own developer or an architect you trust. Pay for it, keep the output, and watch the process more than the result: whether they read solution layers and registrations before changing anything, ask how releases reach production, say when they need to check something, and write down what they found. We are happy to do this with the consultant we propose before a longer engagement.
Can a retained consultancy hand over to our permanent hire once we finally recruit?
Yes, and it should be planned from the start rather than negotiated at the end. Because the work already lives in your repository, runs through your pull request process and is described in a runbook, the handover is mostly pairing and walkthroughs: the new hire joins the pull requests, the consultants take them through the design decisions and the parts that are not obvious from the code, and capacity scales down on the agreed notice as your hire takes ownership. Some teams keep a small time and materials arrangement afterwards for peak periods or specialist work such as PCF controls. Others end cleanly. Either is fine, as long as the exit was agreed on day one.
We need senior Dynamics 365 CE consultants onsite within two weeks and our client contract has penalties. Is that realistic?
Partly, and it is better to know which part before you sign anything. A senior consultancy can usually name the right people quickly, which a recruitment process cannot, and a remote start inside two weeks is often achievable if your access, security review and any end client approval move in parallel. Onsite presence narrows the field further. Solzet delivers from Yerevan, Armenia, and onsite time is arranged as defined visits once visas, travel and consultant availability are confirmed, so we do not promise anybody on your site within two weeks. The safe way to compress the decision is a one page scope, a paid two day assessment that doubles as the vetting, and a start conditional on what that assessment finds.
What is the paid two day assessment, and why not just start?
It is roughly two working days in which the senior consultant you would retain reads your deployed solution: solution layers and unmanaged changes in production, plugin and flow registrations, the security model, integrations, the backlog and open defects. You receive a written read of what is deployed, the risks to your date and a proposed first work package. It is the vetting, because you see the person work on your real system, and it protects a date under penalty, because it shows whether the plan is achievable with the people proposed before a quarter is committed. You keep the findings whatever you decide.
Which contract terms should we insist on when hiring consultants at speed under client penalties?
Named individuals, with substitution only by your written consent. Daily written reporting in the first week covering progress, blockers and outstanding access or decisions. A defined exit at the end of the assessment and of the first work package, with a short notice period and a handover. Obligations tied to what the supplier controls, such as named people, reporting and deliverables accepted against written criteria, rather than your client penalty clause passed through unchanged, with liability agreed case by case. Onsite commitments written as defined visits rather than general presence. And confidentiality, data processing and any subcontractor approval signed before access. The wider contracting model is on our Dynamics 365 subcontracting service page.
We recommend the right solution - whether that's Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, or a custom-built CRM. Some businesses need the Microsoft ecosystem. Others need full control without licensing. We deliver both.
Ready to send us the role brief?
Tell us which apps are live or being built, which roles are missing, the dates, and whether the work is white label under your brand or direct inside your team. You will get a technical call with the consultant who would take the role, named profiles with their real availability, and a straight answer about which step sets your start date.