What is a Dedicated Team Model?

How to choose developers to work on a project? What type of cooperation is better to use? Or is it better to do everything on your own? We believe that a dedicated team model, a particular type of cooperation with a contractor, is a great option. This article will explain what it is and the advantages of this type of cooperation.

How does it work?

The easiest way to understand the terminology is to compare in-house teams, conventional outsourcing, and dedicated team services. So what’s the difference?

• An in-house team is entirely your employees. You sign a contract with them and hire them as part of your company’s staff. The advantages of this cooperation model include, in particular, that such employees will always be aware of the latest news and changes in your company to take into account your needs more accurately. In addition, it is believed that this is the most controlled type of cooperation because all employees will constantly be in your field of vision, and you will know what they are doing and when they are doing it. But there is a downside: first, it takes time to find and hire each specialist and build processes and a team. This can slow down the start of the project. In addition, such cooperation often ends up costing the business more.
• The second type is cooperation with a contractor. Depending on your needs, the company with which you agree to provide services assembles a team for your project to perform tasks and create a software product for you. The organizational issues remain on the contractor’s side, such cooperation is often quite profitable, and the deadlines are clear because they are spelled out in the contract and the cost of providing services. However, depending on the project’s complexity and the contractor company’s characteristics, programmers and other team members may be involved in other projects in parallel. This does not critically affect work efficiency, but at some points, it can “put a spoke in the wheel” of the rapid development and implementation of a software product for your business.
• And the last type we want to talk about is a dedicated team. This is a hybrid between the first and second types of cooperation, as you will still contact the contractor, and he will independently search for and organize the work of your project team. The employees will report directly to you, and each specialist will only work on your project and no others. That is, in fact, you get a well-coordinated team of professionals who, in most cases, have been working together for a long time and have well-established processes. This saves you time and nerves, and you get ready-made software as a result. And although it is a bit more expensive than the classic outsourcing model of cooperation, it is still cheaper than an in-house team.

Who should hire such a team?

Various businesses from different industries can benefit significantly by hiring such a team for cooperation. In particular, the following types of products should pay attention to a dedicated team:

• Startups. Since a startup is a new idea at the initial stage of its development, often the search for a development team slows down the process and can become one of the main stumbling blocks preventing such a project from taking off. If you have enough resources at the initial stage of work and want to get down to business immediately, consider this type of cooperation.
• A business that is far from the development sphere. This is the case when you don’t have an in-house developer, and you may need to enter the digital world right now. Unfortunately, without modern technologies, businesses have very little chance of remaining competitive for a long time. Therefore, a dedicated team will quickly solve your problem in this case.
• A tech company that has already faced development and has many projects in the works. Sometimes the pace of development and scaling becomes too fast, even for those who have been in development for a long time. If a new project comes to your company and you realize that you physically lack the resources to fulfill all the tasks, you can turn to a contractor for this type of cooperation. Everyone will benefit from this: your company, the end customer of the new project, and, in fact, your contractor, who provides you with a dedicated team.

You have the power to decide.

It means that you can choose developers, designers, and other profs who will work with you. And even more: being in charge of processes allows you to make everything you need. We are not saying that you will have to work days and nights. We are saying that this level of control allows you to save your work-life balance and, at the same time, be aware of all changes and stages of work.

Phases of work

Does a dedicated project team structure affect the peculiarities of working on a software product? You are unlikely to notice a significant impact. Therefore, the phases of work remain approximately the same as in the work of in-house developers:

• Discovery process. This stage is critical, though often underestimated. But it is during the discovery stage that research is conducted, infographics are compiled, and critical needs are formed that the software that developers will create must meet. At this stage, a roadmap is formed, which is critical for disciplined and structured work, which is a necessary component of meeting all deadlines. This stage also includes design: from individual pages to the design system.
• Development and testing. Writing code, implementing features, etc. During this stage, the skeleton of a honeycomb is born, from which you can build an MVP at a certain time. Minimum Viable Product allows you to test hypotheses and essential product functions without high development costs. Such a test version of the software will contain only the most critical features and will allow you to check whether such a product is needed, how it works, what should be removed, and what should be improved. You can understand all this by testing it with real users and collecting feedback. After that, you can move on to refinements and further development, as well as testing, and only then — to the product launch.
• After the product is released, the stage of working on bugs follows. After all, despite high-quality testing and MVP, there is a high probability that some bugs will appear only after the first stream of real users. This is absolutely normal. Plus, after the first feedback after the launch, you will be able to determine what else is worth adding to the software.

It’s important to understand that most of these processes occur in parallel. This is a great way to speed up and streamline the workflow. You can see this, for example, in methodologies such as Scrum. It allows you to perform the discovery, development, and testing phases in parallel and with high quality. This also fits well with the dedicated team meaning because the pool of people working on a project usually includes far more than just programmers.

This type of cooperation can be easily compared to various processes in the everyday life of every person. For example, if you have some financial capital, you have several options. You can either manage all the money yourself or you can entrust your funds to a bank. You can install the bank’s app on your smartphone, hire a personal advisor, and use other services offered by the financial institution. You will still own the funds, but you will be using third-party resources to manage and effectively work with this money. And so it is in our case: you will be at the head of the process, but the work will be done for you by a dedicated team.

Where can you hire such a team?

Once you understand what a dedicated project team structure is, you can safely move on to the stage of finding such a team to work with. Magnise suggests you contact us, as we have extensive experience developing and implementing various software!

Sign up for a consultation to discuss all the details. Together we can create the best software for your company!

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