I am the development manager for a small software company. My team focuses on developing our product, and we have some partner companies that do the "professional services" work for our product: things like developing custom add-ons and doing user training and system implementation. We are planning to start doing some of that professional services work in-house, because some customers have said that they would feel more comfortable working directly with us.
Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing? I'm trying to figure out how to structure the development resources for this new team.
One option that comes to mind is to just add some new people to our main development team and then have everyone rotate through that job. This would help spread the knowledge around, but I think that some of the developers would be unhappy about switching projects like that.
Another option would be to form a separate development team to be responsible for the new services work. This ensures that people can focus on the work that they like best, but it has the downside that the new team might not inherit the strong culture of quality that our main team has.
Are there any other options that I'm overlooking?