What is the cellular business model at Create IT?

Create IT organizes its teams into small, autonomous units, each with dedicated management and decision-making authority. These units collaborate and share resources across the company, but each is responsible for its own clients, its own delivery, and its own quality standards. The model allows each unit to be close to its clients and act without waiting for central approval.

How does the embedded team model work?

In most of our engagements (around 70%), our engineers join the client's team directly and work alongside their people for months or years. They participate in sprint cycles, planning, and code reviews as part of the team rather than as external consultants. The remaining 30% of engagements are fixed-scope projects with defined delivery and structured knowledge transfer.

How long do engagements typically last?

Our embedded partnerships run significantly longer than industry norms. Our longest current client relationship is 18 years. Most embedded engagements run for multiple years. Fixed-scope projects vary from a few weeks for a pilot to several months for a full delivery.

Does Create IT provide knowledge transfer at the end of a project?

Yes. Whether a project ends with a handover or continues as an embedded engagement, we document everything, train the client's team, and ensure the knowledge stays with the client. The goal is that the client owns the outcome, not just the output.

Our Approach: How Create IT Works

Our Business Model

Create IT is organized as a network of smaller, autonomous units, each with dedicated management and decision-making authority. These units collaborate and share resources, but each is responsible for its own clients, its own delivery, and its own quality standards.

This is not the most common way to run a technology company. Most IT firms operate from a centralized structure where decisions travel up and down a hierarchy before reaching the people doing the work. We run the other way. The people closest to the client have the authority to act, the responsibility for the outcome, and the accountability that goes with both.

The result is a company where a team of five or six people embedded at a client can make decisions, adjust direction, and solve problems without waiting for sign-off from three levels up. Over 25 years, we have found this is what clients actually need: a team that knows the business and has the authority to act on its behalf.

The advantages of the model:

Agility and Flexibility

When a client's priorities shift, a market condition changes, or a technical decision needs to be reversed, our units adapt without waiting for central approval. The decision is made by the people who understand the situation, who are already in the room, and who will live with the consequence. In practice, this means clients get a quick response, and course corrections happen in the sprint rather than the next quarter.

Scalability

We grow by adding units, not by adding layers. Each new unit is built on the same principles and operates to the same standards as every other part of the company, without the overhead of a centralized management chain. A client relationship that starts with two engineers can scale to fifteen without reorganizing the company around it. The structure supports growth; it does not constrain it.

Increased Efficiency

Each unit is accountable for its own performance. There is no organizational buffer between a decision and its consequence, which means teams stay focused on what matters to the client rather than what matters to internal policies. When something goes wrong, the unit that owns the relationship also owns the fix. That accountability is what keeps quality consistent.

Better Customer Service

Our clients are served by teams that know their business well, are authorized to act on their behalf, and are responsible for the outcome. The person who manages the relationship is the same person who can change the delivery plan. This is not how most IT partnerships work, which is why clients who have experienced both tend to notice the difference.

Common Customer Challenges

Speed up technology footprint

Technology moves faster than most organizations can absorb. New platforms, new architectures, new compliance requirements, new AI capabilities: the list of decisions that need to be made is long, and the cost of a wrong one is high. Most internal IT teams are fully occupied keeping existing systems running. They do not have the bandwidth to evaluate new approaches, build new capabilities, and deliver new features at the same time. We fill that gap, working alongside internal teams rather than replacing them.

Scarcity in technology top-talent

Hiring and keeping experienced engineers is a persistent problem in Portugal and across Europe. The best people have options. Organizations that cannot offer interesting work, real ownership, and a clear path forward lose them after a few years. Building an enterprise technology team from scratch takes years and fails more often than it succeeds. We provide access to a team that has already been assembled, has worked together for years, and already knows how to work inside large client organizations.

Need for high performance teams

Having talented individuals is not the same as having a team. High performance in enterprise technology requires people who know how to work together across different roles, who understand the client's business context, and who can maintain quality over a long project without losing momentum. That takes time to build. We bring it ready, and we embed it inside your organization rather than running it in parallel.

Why partner with Create IT?

Highly qualified people

Our team includes solutions architects, tech leads, senior consultants, and software developers with an average of more than four years at Create IT and, in many cases, more than ten years of professional experience. We are not a staffing company that assembles a team for each engagement from a pool of contractors. The people who work for Create IT have chosen to build their careers here, which means they are invested in the quality of the work and the longevity of the client relationship.

Learning organization

We invest in building capabilities before clients ask for them. Our internal AI agent development predates any client AI projects. Our Azure capabilities were built and certified before they became central to our commercial offer. When we recommend an approach, it is because we have already worked through the problems and know where the complexity sits.

High technical and soft skills

Enterprise projects at large clients require more than technical knowledge. They require people who can work inside a client's organization, challenge assumptions respectfully, communicate across technical and business levels, and build trust with people they did not hire. We hire for both dimensions and invest in developing both. The soft skills matter as much as the technical ones in embedded partnerships that last for years.

Ability to create teams

We build teams from scratch when clients need them and integrate our people into existing client teams when that is what the project requires. We have done both many times, across different sectors and project types. We know what the first three months of an embedded engagement look like, what makes them succeed, and what warning signs to watch for.

The people behind the delivery

Our team covers the full range of roles a complex enterprise technology engagement requires. Product Owners and Scrum Masters who run delivery. Tech Leads and Software Architects who make the structural decisions. Senior Consultants and Software Developers who build what is needed. QA engineers who ensure it holds under pressure. And the people in between who keep everything moving.

The numbers behind the team:

Very high proportion of senior and mid-senior profiles
Strong skills and a very significant level of experience
Average tenure at Create IT: more than 4 years
Many members with more than 10 years of professional experience

Culture and soft-skills suited to strong customer interaction
Superb individual capacity (both hard and soft skills)
Long experience working together on complex projects for large clients
Used to working embedded inside client organizations, often for years

Meet the team

FAQs

Our Approach

The advantages of the model:​

Common Customer Challenges

Why partner with Create IT?

The advantages of the model: