Dedicated Development Team

Businesses who need to quickly ramp up their development, cut the costs and reduce time to market use different models of cooperation between the customer and the contractor.

There are four most common models of such cooperation:

Outstaffing - remote employment, when a hired person carries all the duties for a certain company, being employed by another company.

Outsourcing - hiring a party outside a company to perform services and separate business processes.

Turn-key development - hiring an experienced development team for a project. The team fully designs and constructs the project for the customer (you’ll find more information in our MVP development article).

Dedicated development team - hiring a team of developers who work for the customer’s tasks only. The customer is a part of a workflow in this case.

Dedicated development team combines outsourcing and turn-key models of development. In this article, we will take a closer look at this particular model.

DEDICATED DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Dedicated development team model builds a team for the project’s needs from scratch. The customer actively participates in team-building and communication processes for the whole project. The work can be split into 3 steps: drafting of the project plan, team-building, product development.

Step 1 Project plan drafting

• define the main product sections
• determine the functions of each section (better to form functions as user stories)
• set the date of the final product release
• make a plan of sprints including the priority features
• choose a contractor
• define the technology stack
• make a resource plan, specify which resources do you need to fit the date.

Step 2 Team building

When the project plan is ready, we may form the team. This step is crucial for both sides. The contractor should choose the candidates for the project, the customer should negotiate the final team. The most important criteria are:

• professional experience of candidates and their stack expertise
• experience in the field of development
• personal characteristics of the candidate for the team and project manager
• When choosing a team, you have to define team roles. After that, you should start properly to get the successful implementation of the product in the end.

Step 3 Product development

We recommend having 3-4 weekly sprints for the final team formation. During the sprints, you’ll form the project environment and release 2-3 main functions. Thus you may define the team roles and switch team members if necessary.

During the workflow, you may change the original plan. The main reasons for that:

• user feedback makes you change the functionality of the project
• the need to expand or narrow the functionality after release
• sprint review to change the priorities of the market or Product Owner

Project plan review involves some risks:

• timing change
• cost of project implementation change
• the functionality of the product change.

The product owner is the key team member who is responsible for revision management.

“The PO is someone who is market-facing: he's able to craft and relay a vision. The PO is the owner of a Product Backlog and focused on bringing value back to the customer. He is also responsible for keeping a Product Backlog ordered such that the items at the top of the backlog are sized appropriately for the team to begin working on, and are ready to be taken in for the first Sprint.”
Jeff Sutherland. Scrum.

While the workflow changes, the project plan has to be adjusted after every sprint. In other cases, it doesn’t work. For the plan adjustment it is necessary to involve: Product Owner, Scrum Master (or Project Manager), Analysts, and Architect (or Tech lead).
The customer or his representatives take an active part in the work of the dedicated development team. The customer representatives have the right to initiate team review, change the goals and functions of the project, etc.

ADVANTAGES OF THE DEDICATED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAM

The contractor is fully responsible for resource management and project challenges.
Scrum Master (project manager) handles the time-consuming activities such as workflow, team-management, budget control. Thus the customer focuses on business objectives and strategic goals of the project.
Optimized budget and reduced costs. Having an in-house team comes into extra costs for rent, infrastructure, vacation, bonuses, and more. The dedicated team model allows us to reduce these costs and provides a discount for the scope of work.
Fixing resource shortage and risk management. The contractor engages the human resources according to your scalability changes.
Direct communication with the development team brings transparency and helps to provide a product of better quality, thanks to the personal responsibility of each team member.

IN-HOUSE DEVELOPMENT OR DEDICATED DEVELOPMENT TEAM?

The workflow will be the following:

• Define the scope of work.
• Plan the project budget. Add the costs for human resources (hiring, rent, taxes, equipment).
• Ask for the commercial offer from your potential dedicated team contractor.

If the estimation of the team doesn’t exceed 20-30% of your planned budget, it's better to choose a dedicated team, but try to cut functionality to optimize the budget.

When choosing a dedicated development team?

• development of complex corporate software
• the product development period is more than 4 months
• the target audience of the product is a business or mass-market product, and the product belongs to the professional segment (business software, game industry, fintech, etc.)
• development of a product that involves scalability and support after the completion of the main stage of development.

When to avoid a dedicated development team?

• MVP development
• the terms of development are less than 4 months, and the team size is 4 people or less
• amateur segment development with a small target market.

Republished from: https://appservice.us/blog/dedicated-development-team