Dedicated Teams: benefits and challenges

The practice of utilizing dedicated team models is widely used in cooperation with offshore development partners. For the last five years, Axon has built many dedicated teams for global businesses and we would like to share our experience with you.  

In this blog post, we will detail the main benefits and challenges you may face by using dedicated team model for your business. So let’s begin! 

Dedicated team model

Dedicated Team is a cooperative model between a client and software development services provider according to which the latter creates the aforementioned team of dedicated engineers that will work exclusively with a client’s project on a long term basis. 

The vendor undertakes a search for team members based on the client’s requirements, as well as organizational details such as team work space. Dedicated teams usually work from the development vendor’s office. There сan also be arranged business trips to the client’s state or vice versa as required. All working processes of a team can be managed by a client or by a project manager from the vendor’s side that is negotiated individually. 

There is also an established pricing system for the organization and maintenance of a dedicated team. It includes monthly payments that cover salaries for members, the fee of the vendor as well as administrative overhead.  

The model of a dedicated team is the most useful when a development plan isn’t clearly defined and the requirements for the solution’s characteristics have to be changed or your solution requires continuous maintenance. 

How can businesses gain from dedicated teams? The main benefits

Cost-effectiveness 

Choosing a dedicated team model is economically viable. Aside from incomparable differences between the cost of dedicated teams and in-house developers, it is also more profitable than project-based models of cooperation.  This depends largely on the specification of the project and the size of the dedicated team, which makes the price for this model lower by 10-20%. 

Maximum focus on the client’s project 

An important advantage of a dedicated team is its full involvement in solution development.The vendor thus provides a team that is not easily distracted by working on other projects that lead to the increased adaptability of team members. It allows clients to easily reconfigure the team at any stage of the working process as required. 

The team is fully managed by the client

Another advantage of a dedicated team model is the possibility for clients to select, and manage every working process of a dedicated team. There are software engineers, quality assurance specialists, UI/UX designers and a project manager at the client’s disposal. 

Tight-knit work of client and team  

The actual primary thing businesses gain from dedicated teams is that this type of collaboration creates an atmosphere of team building where every member is led to achieving common goals. It allows for long-term work planning more accurately and invests in the project by contributing more effort. The close-knit collaboration between the client and a dedicated team can bear incredibly tangible results. ‍

Challenges in creating a dedicated team

By choosing a dedicated team you may face several challenges. But there is no need to be alarmed. If your vendor is well-experienced in the creation of dedicated teams, these problems are easily worked out. It usually takes some time to hire the right team members and configure their working processes. When the hiring stage has started the client must be completely involved in order to avoid delays or misunderstandings. The rest, however, is up to the work of recruitment managers. Another challenge is in the configuration of the working processes inside the team. The project managers can come to the team's assistance, as well by using project management tools such as JIRA by Atlassian, Basecamp, Trello, etc. 

Axon experience in providing Dedicated team services

To understand which model is suited to a client, we at Axon study their needs in great detail. We need to clearly understand clients’ requirements, how they plan to manage an outsourced resource and what duration of involvement we will have in the development of their product or service, or whether it will be full time or part-time. 

If a client expects to cooperate in the long term, perhaps for a year or more, we can build them a dedicated team. Then discuss related to the commercial terms and the flat-rate are agreed upon. Clients also take into consideration the goal of every team member and their workload.

The work conditions of a dedicated team that we usually propose to a client include the following: 

• The R&D team that works only on the client’s project (5-10 people).
• Work on the project on a long-term basis (from 6 months).
• The project is coordinated by the client 
  

Our task in creating a dedicated team consists of a search for specialists. There are quality assurance engineers, UI/UX designer, project manager and/or business analysts in a dedicated team as well as developers. This is an organized team that is completely involved in every aspect of the project and works exclusively with it.

At this stage, clients may decide on the formal criteria for each specialist. We then submit these formal criteria to our recruitment team, which hires the most qualified candidates for each team position.

When a dedicated team is created, it takes some time for each team member to figure out and understand the essence of the project. At the end of this stage, the dedicated team then starts fully-fledged project work.

The clients are engaged in the organization of the work of a dedicated team on an executive level. They own the project roadmap and carry out full synchronization of every team members’ work. The organizational challenges encountered are usually delegated to the project manager. He distributes tasks as required between team members, holds stand-ups, and ensures that the delivery of all project tasks is timely.

Besides the organizational maintenance of dedicated teams’ daily activity, Axon takes care of the professional growth of every team member. To all of our employees, we offer free external and internal professional training courses, certifications, and organize monthly meetups. We are striving to build teams that meet all your expectations and will be productive within the whole time of our long-term cooperation.

If you're looking for a development team to create or improve your solution we will be glad to assist you in achieving this goal. Learn more about hiring process of dedicated development teams at Axon.