Employing a dedicated development team is a trending business strategy where a company engages an entire offshore team to develop software. Compared to outsourcing, this model allows you to control the structure and workload of the team, as they are the company's employees.
This model is called so because, thanks to full-time employment, the team works on your project only until its completion. When you employ dedicated teams, you get a group of professionals explicitly tailored to your business goals. Although, like every model, it has its pros and cons, it all depends on how suitable this model is for your case.
There are two aspects of a dedicated team. In the first case, we discuss a separate, full-fledged team comprising all staff members. In the second case, the customer has the opportunity to hire a dedicated development team that will complement the existing employees and strengthens the environment with several external experts. Dedicated teams usually do not collaborate with internal coders and are managed from the customer's side but managed on the customer's side.
Reasons to choose a dedicated team
Dedicated web workers help startups or companies expand their operations to build and maintain websites cost-effectively and provide workforce flexibility and a talent pool. Here is a checklist of reasons why:
- A dedicated development team is flexible enough to focus on the scope of work and tasks, expenses, and available resources, as well as the prioritization of the development team itself.
- If your in-house team has a talent shortage, choosing a dedicated team model is a great way out. This feature allows you to discover your startup to a pool of professionals worldwide, allowing you to select the top talent for an affordable price.
- When you employ a dedicated development team, you hire a cohesive organism guided by your goals and follow your directions and development vector.
- It is clear that the probability that such specialists will leave the project halfway to its completion is excluded.
- If you need to increase or decrease your development team, your IT outsourcing provider is entirely in charge of rotating specialists and handling HR issues. Thus, you do not need to worry about human resources activities and related risks.
Team selection steps
Begin with a strong understanding of the product
Even before you start looking for developers and app development agencies, the first thing you should do is define your project clearly. Every project manager knows that this is important for any aspect of software development because it gives the entire team a single direction and plans to follow.
Choosing country
You can find a suitable dedicated development team in the most remote corner of the planet. The balance between competencies and cost is important. The most advantageous in this regard are specialists from Eastern Europe, primarily from Ukraine and Poland, as well as India and Argentina.
Expert consultation
Expert consultation is a huge advantage in helping you shape your project idea and choose the most suitable feature set to solve your current business challenges. In addition to the consultation, you can also ask for a proof of concept to ensure that your initial idea is feasible and that it can be turned into reality. These two actions will help you make the final decision on your project, get the most accurate estimates and understand the risks associated with the development.
Explore the market
Once you know your requirements, the next step is researching the supplier market and finding potential candidates. Here is what you should consider when shortlisting potential candidates:
- The location of your development team
- Project history and portfolio
- Testimonials
Choose your team
Once you have chosen a supplier and signed a contract, the real work of building a team begins. Remember that at this stage, you don't have a team yet. The supplier company will only help you build one. They will do this by helping you hire or select developers from their internal talent pool. Deciding what roles you need in the team is crucial. Note that the exact composition of the development team will differ from project to project.
No matter what roles you need, it's worth getting involved in the hiring process. Review their CVs for their skills and experience. It is best if you also interview them to test their experience. Hiring for positions is probably the most important step in building your development team.
Signing the contract
Before employing a dedicated software development team, you should sign a contract and non-disclosure agreement with its members. The contract should include project requirements, budget, deadlines, and other necessary details. A non-disclosure agreement is also necessary to maintain confidentiality, whether you hire an in-house team or outsource the project to a dedicated software development service provider.
Release and contract renewal
After the experts have done their part, you can draw some conclusions about how well this model worked in relation to your project. Hopefully, with the next contract, you will entrust more responsibility to remote experts, increase the scope of your projects and earn more money as a result.
Common mistakes
1. Priority of price over quality
When choosing a developer, customer companies often focus on low prices. However, pursuing low development costs is bound to lead to disappointment. The money you spend to pay for the work should be secondary to your return on investment. Experienced coders will be expensive, but the outcome will help you make more money. Of course, every business has project budget limits. However, what really matters is the value you get for your spending. Furthermore, low-cost workers will only increase your expenses in the long run.
2. Selecting a company without research
It is necessary to find information about the company either on its website or by talking to its manager. Also, read customer reviews about the company on Clutch.co. Find out how long the company has been on the market and how many projects it has participated in.
3. Inadequate program documentation
Poor documentation or lack of it is definitely a red flag because it becomes difficult to track or understand source code, basic workflows, product specifications, testing strategies, etc. So, before hiring a dedicated development team, ensure that the vendor follows the best software documentation practices. It is good to have a technical expert by your side to review the code periodically.
4. Limiting yourself geographically
Benefit of hiring a dedicated development team is that you have the whole world as a talent pool. So it's best to maximize this advantage by not limiting hiring to your immediate location. Another way you can pay higher than you are supposed to. The reason is simple - the cost per developer hour varies worldwide. So, cheapness does not necessarily mean that the developer performs low-quality work.
5. Hiring a developer without an interview
Employing talent is very important when you decide to outsource and, therefore, should not be taken lightly. Selecting the right talent is very important, so the hiring process should be carefully thought out. Many companies make decisions solely based on the developer company's image and brand without conducting interviews with the developer who will work on the project. At the same time, the production team's skills and experience significantly impact the results of software application development. In addition, direct communication with the team will help them achieve their goals.
6. Insufficient involvement of the development team
When you have a dedicated development team, it's important to remember that they are just as much a part of your organization as your local team. The only real difference is that they work in a different location, in a different office space. Depriving your remote team of important business knowledge, excluding them from team calls, or preventing them from giving their opinions or feedback can leave them feeling isolated, undervalued, and unrecognized. Additionally, your dedicated software development team will no longer have a comprehensive view of the business, the project at hand, and the broader goals of your business, leading to sub-optimized software solutions. This, in turn, can affect their morale and motivation and hinder productivity.
Cooperation tips
The excessive micromanagement
Developers are usually not chosen at random. Finding a competent outsourcing provider who adheres to quality standards and shares your principles is difficult, but once you find such a team, let them do what they do best. Regular meetings will allow you to track progress and initiate planned updates. Regular interference will slow down the pace of the team and the development process, make employees nervous and inevitably turn them into passive programmers rather than active contributors. If you want to learn more about how to hire a dedicated development team and the hiring process itself, read our recent blog post.
Providing feedback and being open to receiving it
Clear and concise feedback should be your main tool for collaboration. It will provide an opportunity to share your vision in a productive way and help your dedicated development team to work according to your standards. And you should always encourage your team to share feedback about their work with you. Feedback is most useful when people share it, not just give it.
Confidence in your team
Trust the process, particularly if you've never managed a remote team before. Scheduling, daily, reviews, and other routines play their part in keeping the communication loop closed. Even if it seems like too much, just trust your team.
Keep your team motivated and engaged
When you hire dedicated remote developers, it's worth checking your future team members for self-organization. This is just one way to ensure they stay focused and motivated to work at their best.
Celebrate the success together
Make sure to celebrate the victory with your dedicated developers, no matter how small or big. This will increase the sense of belonging among them. Moreover, since they will become more loyal to their work, the company can enjoy a long-term fruitful relationship with the team.
Conclusion
Today, most tech giants and new startups outsource their IT processes to third-party vendors. The dedicated team model is one of the most effective models of interaction that allows companies to accelerate business processes, increase value, gain access to the resource base and eliminate risks. Although a dedicated team is not the only option, it still has many advantages, providing your software project with all the necessary engineers and creating high-quality software for your core business needs and requirements at the best cost.
In turn, the client should be ready to respond to any situation smoothes cooperation, and helps achieve the desired results. For this purpose, you need to get acquainted with the market and define your needs in order to know the direction of your demands in the future. Use our advice on choosing a dedicated software development team and save yourself additional worries about the correctness of your decisions.