Dedicated Development Team

Hiring a dedicated development team surely is a common approach to building a sustainable and profitable business. Both startups and established entities go for it to beat the competition and reap their reward.

A brilliant business idea may get lost if it is not delivered to market in time; and by market, we mean the Internet primarily. It does not matter what you do or what your plans are. It will need at least a user-friendly, neat, and functional website or app.

Here is where dedicated software development teams step in.

A dedicated development team is a group of developers who work on nothing else but your project. A dedicated team will operate as if it belonged to your organization but, unlike an in-house team, it may be stationed off-shore, in a cost-effective region.

A dedicated team provider will take care of recruiting additional experts, development workflow tools and overall infrastructure, and setup a convenient communication model.

The general cases in which a business needs to hire dedicated software development teams are:

The COVID-19 outbreak has changed the way modern businesses work – not necessarily in a bad way! It helped the software development industry and for those ready to outsource their development tasks, to see new opportunities and thrive. This Deloitte research proves that an all-remote organization of the business improves its short-term resilience and ensures the long-term growth of a business.

Source: 2020 global outsourcing survey by Deloitte

All of the general reasons to hire a dedicated software development team (listed above) are valid for any size of business.

The structure of a software team, dedicated to the solution of a specific task, must correspond to the said task.

So, for example, if one is looking to hire web development teams, it must invariably include Front End and Back End specialists.

The development tasks are not restricted to the web. It is not unheard of that employers outsource embedded development tasks and send hardware samples by mail.

Quality Assurance has become a customary position in every dev team. If you encounter one without QA Engineers, it is probably because Junior Developers are the ones who write and run tests.

DevOps manage Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery workflows and automate repetitive tasks within a dedicated development team. Their autotesting frameworks sometimes replace QA departments.

A Business Analyst is a team’s expert generalist. They may focus on studying a given niche and thus work as a Subject Matter Expert or master complex Data Science tools. They also document software requirements and features while everyone else is immersed in their own job.

A Project Manager or a Technical Team Lead is a team’s frontman and a driving force. The importance of their leadership skills is paramount. Not only do they tie the team together and guide it according to a chosen methodology, but the communication with the client is all on them.

A Product Owner’s (PO) engagement in the development process is as much important for the project’s success as is PM’s. They either act on behalf of the client company or are the client in the flesh themselves.

Working together with a PO, a Chief Technical Officer overlooks the development process and may directly supervise the development team’s work. Their contribution is useful when the client’s in-house team has certain coding conventions or other internal regulations.

There are three mainstream pricing models when it comes to outsourcing development tasks: monthly per team (which is used by dedicated developers), fixed-price (also known as project-based), and time-material.

None of them is meant to completely replace the core team model. In other words, in-house developers can work in parallel with a remote team dedicated to solving other tasks.

Project-based outsourcing model pros and cons

Project-based IT outsourcing requires a client to finish the work on the requirements before making a contract. Even a perfect description must be explained to the Project Manager and Business Analyst of the team of their choice. The reason for this is that the client pays for the end result. It is in the best interest of a given team to properly estimate the scope of the project and deliver it in time.

Dedicated team vs project-based model comparison table

Based on the dedicated development team definition, let us now compare how it is different from teams working on the project-based model.

Time-materials model pros and cons

The Time & materials model is close to the dedicated development team model, and it will be easier to understand its applications in comparison to the latter. As the name suggests, the pricing is fixed per hour for the actual labor and equipment (plus other resources) used. A client and a contractor agree between themselves on the frequency of payments and the project milestones.

Note that this model does not necessarily imply the need for a team: it is the de-facto standard for most freelance developers, say for example on Upwork.

This model allows  for tracking the progress of each hired developer individually, and works best in the following cases:

If your project has the potential to scale up and down, hire dedicated developers.

Dedicated vs time-materials model comparison table

It is possible to choose the time-materials model for long-term projects when the requirements cannot be described in detail before the start of development, the speed-to-market is of lesser importance, and there are many minor markers of the project’s completion, as opposed to a few major ones (as in the case of hundreds of small fixes and improvements to an existing project). Otherwise, the overall budget risks getting out of hand.

The dedicated development team model grants better control over the project’s milestones thanks to a professionally performed discovery phase.

Regardless of project scope and domain, dedicated development teams can always be used to the  the client’s advantage best. There are certain cases when it’s not advisable to hire a dedicated software development team, because its potential will not be fully utilized.

A teams pros and cons will all come into play in the long run. Make an informed decision with the help of our checklist.

Advantages

Playing to the strengths of a dedicated team ensures that not a drop of its precious experience is wasted, while you get the maximum benefit.

Costs

As the Deloitte survey shows, the pandemic has helped numerous businesses to establish mutually profitable trade relations across the globe.

The mere comparison of software developer salaries in the US and EU against that of the most financially attractive regions implies that outsourcing from the US or EU would mean saving around 50% of project development costs.

The dedicated development team services are paid monthly and are easy to track (the same way as for in-house employees). The payment would include nothing more but team members’ salaries and the provider fee (which includes infrastructure, management, and overhead expenses).

Core team augmentation

The dedicated development team outsourcing model works best when experts hired offshore are seen as a part of the core team. A staff augmentation outsourcing model is sometimes confused with the dedicated team model. The difference is that, sticking to the staff augmentation model, you may hire a single specialist (e.g., a software engineer) instead of an entire team.

Hire a dedicated team of experts to cover the tech domains where your core team lacks expertise. This is what indisputable tech giants like Google, Slack, Microsoft, Alibaba, and GitHub do, oftentimes in Eastern Europe.

The choice is yours as to whether or not to terminate the contract after the completion of the project. The dedicated development team may keep adding new features and supporting the product indefinitely.

Time

Dedicated teams help to save precious time in many ways.

Transparency and control

A dedicated development team model keeps all the advantages of agile development workflow.

Transparency is equally important before the development starts and even before the contract is signed. The agreements on how to handle deadlines, how often to expect product releases, and so on, will all be considered when it’s time to evaluate progress.

If a client wants to have as little engagement in development as possible, this is negotiable also.

Top talent produces top quality

The Global software development labor market is highly competitive and versatile. No wonder! The demand for development service is ever growing:

Which is why, when you notice a team that has accumulated a portfolio of successful cases, it means that it’s been in the trenches for some time.

A dedicated development team that has finished a project similar to what you have in mind is a true gem. Finding it is like winning the lottery if you’re dealing with a highly complex and narrow niche. One could say that by choosing a dedicated development model you access the top 5% of professionals right away. Can there be any doubt about the quality they’ll deliver?

Here’s but a few examples of how blatantly cheap it can be:

Although the last two examples do not provide the exact price of outsourcing, eventually selling a company for 1,000 times the initial investment is obviously a great deal.

Flexibility

It is important to be able to scale a core team to quickly respond to the market changes, and one of the most distinctive features of dedicated development teams is that they require little effort in this regard.

One won’t be bothered with ethical or legal issues when scaling down their dedicated development team while in the case of a core team it would mean firing an employee and following all the procedures that it entails.

Discuss your situation with a dedicated team provider, and your team can grow threefold or shrink to three specialists in total – it’s no big deal either way.

Challenges

Dedicated development teams fulfill a large spectrum of business tasks. Nonetheless, using them as a one-size-fits-all tool would be counter-efficient.

Not so good for short-term projects

Cooperation with dedicated development teams implies passing through the stages of preliminary planning, recruitment, and approval. A client who only needs a few quick fixes here and there or a low effort working prototype, should keep their eyes open for the time-materials model.

As a dedicated team familiarizes itself with a problem domain, they become more efficient at improving a product and proactively suggesting better solutions. Simultaneously, a client’s confidence in the team grows.

After all, there is an option to hire a tiny minimal-build dedicated team (if the agency has a proven record of successful cases in the niche of your interest). This option is viable if a project is expected to evolve.

Timezone difference

As usual, dedicated development teams shift their schedule so that it overlaps with a clients’ office working hours.

The considerable difference can even be used to a client’s advantage. For example, if they want to maintain their server at night or provide 24/7 customer support services.

Which team to choose?.

Now that you’ve arrived at the conclusion that the dedicated development team model will best fit the scope and budget of your project, the next question persists: which team exactly?

Searching for the team will take hours of googling for sure. Software development service providers sometimes register their account on freelance platforms like Upwork. B2B Clutch reviews and of course, the suggestions of your fellow entrepreneurs will come in handy.

It does not matter whether the budget you run on is tight or virtually unlimited. The goal of any business is to deliver a great product to their community, making as much profit as possible on the way, which is why the region of outsourcing matters.

Here are some locations that usually save their international customers a pretty penny:

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe steadily crawls up in the global ranking of service providers, occupying the top 20 in the Kearney Global Services Location Index 2019 (GSLI). Its financial attractiveness score is literally the highest on the top 20 list. It is noted in the report that the countries that previously had a higher score have been ranked lower because of the price differential: Poland, for example.

Eastern European specialists set up game servers, work on human-machine interfaces and computer vision algorithms in cutting-edge self-driving vehicles, upgrade various legacy software, safely process TiBs of statistical data, and do many, many other wonderful things.

Poland

Poland scored just one hundredth of a point score less than Eastern Europe in 2019 GSLI, still remaining a great place to hire software development teams. The balance between prices, talent availability, and business environment conditions attracts business owners who want to expand their influence across the EU and pay much less than they would to a Germany- or UK- based company.

It would be fair to say that a bunch of other Eastern European countries successfully compete with Poland in the trade of digital services: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, and Bulgaria are also recognized for their talented and dedicated development teams.

India

The advantages of outsourcing to India are as follows:

Consider some other Asian countries: China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Their overall rank and the digital resonance metric are high enough to be worthy of attention, if there are no significant cultural and legal gaps between their country and yours, of course.

Others

Last but not least, there are remarkable countries in the Americas and Africa that might offer effective niche-targeted solutions for those looking to hire dedicated development teams

Egypt, for example, hosts multiple R&D centers: Mentor Graphics and Valeo being most notable. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Vodafone International Services, and Orange Business Services have captive centers there; it creates opportunities for education and the subsequent emergence of masterful teams in their respective domains.

Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil have likewise attracted the attention of international investors and saw major tech infrastructure improvement as a result.

Some countries have failed to keep up with the pace of change in the tech world, and now fall behind, having a low service price alone not being enough to make up for the lack of skill. After all, the companies that plan to station their services offshore hire only highly specialized experts.

When you have a chance to study a team’s organization from the inside, here is a couple of approaches to consider:

GRPI

This team estimation model lists the aspects of team organization in descending priority: Goals — Roles — Processes — Interpersonal Relationships. Relationships are the basis of the whole structure. Roles rely on Processes and, in turn, ensure the achievement of Goals. If any of the aspects is lacking, the whole structure will fall apart like an unstable house of cards.

To build a team, start with Goals. To examine why it’s failing, start with Relationships.

T7

Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger came up with a witty system of team success factors, all the words starting with “T”. Five of them are internal. The other two, external:

Source

It’s pretty self-explanatory. Each of the factors is easy to recognize and evaluate when you have a close look at a given team during the interview stage.

It is merely natural that every team member’s performance is high in favorable conditions. People feel content with their management if it fosters individual growth and provides them with the tools they need. They do what they enjoy, surrounded by friends. Their team leaders are skilled professionals themselves.

Look for providers that care about their teams.

Also, evaluate how a given provider performed in the past. Check out the specifics of their finished cases and client reviews. Finally, give preference to a provider that has every specialist you need in their stack already.

We are confident that we meet global quality standards, and there’s an ever-increasing number of cases that prove our experience.

In no time, you’ll be able to hire a software development team to augment your core team, or work single-handedly on your main project.

Have you checked out our portfolio? We enjoy developing mobile apps to drive your company forward!

5 simple steps to your dedicated development team

With the exception of small simple projects, the dedicated development team model fits all scopes and all businesses.

All the benefits of this outsourcing model made it the preferred choice of dozens and hundreds of companies all around the globe. This choice keeps helping small startups flourish and large multinational corporations scale and adapt.

We’d be happy to provide you with a perfect team. Powered by our strong talent pool, your organization will move fast and achieve its purpose.