EPC Microsoft Co-Managed IT

Staff augmentation is hourly billed warm bodies — typically junior to mid-level consultants placed on your team for the duration of a project, billed by the hour, often through a third-party staffing house. There is no architecture accountability and no Microsoft-product depth beyond what each individual brings. EPC Co-Managed is the opposite shape: tenured senior architects (partner-level on Errin O'Connor's bench, principal-level on the Large tier, with Errin himself leading the largest engagements) on a productized monthly retainer. The architects are named in the SOW, are accountable for architecture quality, attend your Architecture Review Board, co-sign decisions with your CIO, and carry the EPC Group brand reputation into every recommendation. The economic structure is wholly different too — staff augmentation gives you hours; Co-Managed gives you outcomes co-owned with named senior architects.

Your CIO. That is the deliberate, regulator-aware design point. The Co-Managed model is engineered so the accountability boundary stays inside your organization — your runbook, your ITSM tickets, your change advisory board, your audit evidence, your breach-notification chain. EPC contributes senior expertise, architecture review, escalation backup, and co-authored quarterly executive briefings — but the chain of accountability for production state, compliance posture, and incident response stays internal. This is the right shape for healthcare under HIPAA, financial services under FINRA / SOC 2, federal under FedRAMP / CMMC 2.0, and clinical research under 21 CFR Part 11. If you want EPC to OWN the accountability, the right product is Managed Microsoft Lifecycle, not Co-Managed IT.

Yes, on quarter boundaries. If you hire a senior architect internally who absorbs scope EPC was previously covering, we re-evaluate the tier band at the next quarter boundary and the new monthly fee takes effect the following quarter. No early-termination penalty for a good-faith downsize. The mirror case is also handled honestly — if a key internal team member departs and you need more EPC coverage, we upgrade the tier band on the same quarterly cadence rather than silently quoting overage hours. Co-Managed is designed to flex with your internal team's maturity, not to lock in a level of dependence that is inappropriate to your situation.

Honestly: probably not. Co-Managed assumes your internal team can OWN day-to-day operations — the runbooks, the on-call rotation, the ITSM queue, the change advisory board, the policy-of-record. If your team is too junior to own those, EPC will tell you that during scoping and recommend Managed Microsoft Lifecycle instead (where EPC owns operations) — or, more often, a phased approach: 18 months of Managed Lifecycle while EPC trains your internal team, then a planned transition to Co-Managed as your team matures. Selling Co-Managed into a junior internal team sets the engagement up to fail; we have learned this the hard way and the scoping conversation is the place to be honest about it.

Reasonable question and a fair concern. The answer is that EPC's productized service catalog is deliberately structured so each tier fits a different accountability + augmentation shape — Adoption Accelerator for the 90-day campaign, Co-Managed IT for the augmentation play, Managed Lifecycle for the full ownership play, fixed-fee SOWs for one-time events. The named architects are not commission-incentivized to expand scope; the quarterly executive briefing is engineered to surface honestly whether the engagement is delivering against named outcomes. If we are not delivering, the briefing has to say so out loud — and if a different tier (or no engagement at all) is the right fit, we will tell you. The published-tier-band + named-architect + quarterly-co-authored-briefing structure is the structural defense against the conflict you are right to ask about.

Yes, where applicable. EPC Group is a Microsoft Solutions Partner with six designations (Data & AI, Infrastructure, Modern Work, Security, Business Applications, Digital & App Innovation). Co-Managed engagements that contribute to a tenant migration, an Azure landing zone, a Copilot rollout, a Fabric or D365 implementation are eligible for FastTrack co-coordination, co-sell partner attribution, and where the workload qualifies, ECIF (Enterprise Cloud Investment Fund) partner-funded engagements that subsidize a portion of EPC's fees. The Large Co-Managed tier explicitly includes Microsoft Partner Center coordination; the Small and Medium tiers include attribution support on a case-by-case basis. Your named architect will identify the qualifying paths during the assessment phase.

Three step process. Step 1: during the 2-week assessment, we inventory your current vendor stack — every consulting and managed-service contract touching Microsoft. Step 2: we identify where Co-Managed replaces a current vendor (typical: a per-pillar specialist vendor with overlap on Microsoft estate) versus where it ADDS to the stack (typical: a vertical-specific SaaS integrator with unique value). Step 3: we author a vendor-transition runbook — who does what during the overlap period (typically 3–6 months), who owns the customer relationship, how the existing SOWs wind down, what data and IP transfer. The result is usually a 15–30% aggregate vendor spend reduction plus a single architecture review board seat replacing four uncoordinated account managers. We will not propose displacing a vendor we think is doing good work; the assessment surfaces honest answers there.

Termination notice is 90 days, same as the Managed Lifecycle product. During the notice period the named EPC architect delivers a formal handoff package: the architecture-of-record document, the runbook library (already co-authored, so it is genuinely yours), the dashboard sources and DAX, the open architecture decision register, the active modernization roadmap, the lifecycle stage maturity scorecard, and a knowledge-transfer plan for any open work items. No proprietary lock-in: every dashboard runs on your own Power BI / Fabric capacity; every policy lives in your own Purview / Defender / Entra tenant; every runbook is in your shared documentation system. Because the Co-Managed model already keeps day-to-day ownership internal, the transition out is structurally easier than transitioning out of a full Managed Services engagement — the muscle memory is already inside your team.