A successful startup team is defined with its mobility, rapid changes and ability to instant replace members of the team for new goals and objectives. Dedicated software team should be created or hired for building a new product as a startup, since such a team can perform specified tasks. The question is what is more lucrative and useful: to hire dedicated programmers team or your own in-house team of specialists? We collected all the pros and cons for you to find out an answer and apply it for a future startup project.
What a Dedicated Team Is?
There are different teams in the IT field, but a dedicated team differs in setting goals, therefore affects the technology of the team building.
A dedicated team is fully focused on the project, and a client controls the work process and gets the opportunity to switch attention to more complex tasks. A dedicated team is a model of cooperation between a client and the service provider. With a dedicated team, a client gets a team of specialists who are selected according to the requirements of a project. Team efficiency and KPI of each specialist is regularly monitored, and adjustments are made to the workflow. Such an approach is very crucial for a startup project, as this team is fully dedicated to it on any stage of development.
When a Dedicated Team Should Be Considered?
• For focusing on long-term cooperation.
• When project requirements change frequently.
• For further increasing of the team.
• When there is a lack of time/desire/resources to manage/build your team.
Clients choose dedicated programmers when they need to increase a team size within the company, but there is no time and desire to hire new specialists.
Dedicated Team Structure
The team consists of a project manager or technical team lead and 1-3 engineers. To choose the best team for your project there are several stages:
1. Analysis of customer requirements to provide developers with the necessary information on the project. It consists of:
• definition of infrastructure and requirements for dedicated developers
• definition of the work scope and tasks that a dedicated team should perform
2. Drafting a contract with information on terms, costs, and agreements for a project
3. Formation of a dedicated team, including the selection of developers, providing them with the necessary equipment, software and office place.
It is very important at the beginning of a startup to create an atmosphere of certainty among employees. The functional, interaction zones, intersections, main business processes, and time guidelines are determined. Employees need to understand what they are responsible for, and what should not be solved without coordination with a manager. Feedback is very important to both individual and team.
How to determine a payment for this team?
Services of a dedicated team are paid monthly. Pricing is quite simple: the amount depends on the composition and size of a team, and specialists’ skills.
Dedicated Team vs In-house Team
Now projects require close contact of the development team with managers, marketers, business analysts, as well as constant feedback from users.
What team is better to choose for a project? Compare the two options: in-house and dedicated team.
A dedicated team carries out work according to the tasks specified by a customer, who controls the workflow, while the team is engaged only in his or her project. A customer can hire and fire employees and regulate the workload of a team.
An in-house team is a model in which the company has its specialists and adjusts them to the project tasks.
Choosing a model of a dedicated team for your project, you get full control over its work. Specialists of the dedicated team are more deeply immersed in the affairs of your organization, they better understand the processes functioning in it, its goals.
As an in-house team, dedicated specialists have important pros: the transparency of the communication process. You can fully control your specialists, assign them a schedule convenient for you, distribute tasks between them. Constant feedback allows you to take into account all the requirements and comments of the client and make the necessary changes in time.
All the advantages of the dedicated team are especially well revealed with long and complex projects, while in-house specialists are good for small projects.
7 Advantages of Hiring Dedicated Teams for a Startup
1. DT is more personality-oriented. By hiring a dedicated team, most customers do not just look for additional resources for testing, they seek to get specialists motivated and interested in the project, who will be proactive and will do everything possible to make the final product perfect. Full involvement in the requirements and methodology of the project helps to get the desired result.
2. DT is frequently used for long-term projects. The project becomes valuable due to the accumulation of expertise and the preservation of knowledge. Programmers study a project in detail and devote all their time to it.
3. The transparency of the process is possible due to the constant presence of specialists nearby, specialists have no other projects, and are involved just in the specified work.
4. The ability to control the progress of work is also closely related to transparency. A lead of a team carries ongoing reporting on development phases. Remote developers are harder to control in such a case.
5. You can adjust the running time according to the client's time zone.
6. DT allows you to quickly build up a team if necessary because the services that offer such teams always have the necessary developers.
7. Detailed reports and ongoing collaboration have a huge impact on the quality of the work result.
For you to compare there are several disadvantages of a dedicated team:
• high prices;
• task planning and employee loading and associated risks are on the side of a customer as the customer is obliged to pay developers even if the specialist has completed the task ahead of schedule or if there are no tasks for some time.
Bottom Line
All the enumerated above lead to the main thought – a startup needs a dedicated team as it is the most appropriate option to develop a project from scratch. Dedicated programmers’ popularity can be explained with its devotion to one project, it’s useful for cooperation when longevity and scope of work are more than a month. Any requirements can be adjusted for the team more conveniently than for remote or in-house developers.
The choice of a dedicated team eliminates the need for a long search and hiring employees, a complicated and inconvenient communication process. This all plays a major role, as it increases the efficiency of the startup.