What is the Dedicated Team Model?

The IT industry has evolved rapidly in recent years because now the lack of flexibility when working on a project means the waste of opportunities. All over the world, the cooperation charter between employer and hired staff is shifting. Because of the epidemic, IT professionals are able to afford working remotely without losing efficiency. Team building skills are very helpful these days. Now, either the entire project or part of it can be handed over to outsourced professionals.

The Dedicated Team Model (also known as DTM) is a partnership model between the customer and the software development service. This model is used mainly in the IT sector, and in the company Brights especially. More broadly, DTM professionals can be involved in industries such as construction, logistics, security and safety, housekeeping/cleaning, marketing.

Dedicated Team Structure in Project Management

The customer selects a supplier company and makes a call, the project manager soon picks up his order.

A dedicated team may be composed of specialists from designers to developers. The project goal and requirements define exactly what the customer is looking for. What is dedicated team model?

Briefly about the DTM membership:

Front-end experts are tasked with data transformation into a visual interface. They mainly operate using CSS, HTML and JavaScript to allow people to work with the product.

Back-end developers work internally with system content, server technologies – with database, architecture, and program logic. These specialists usually work with SQL, MongoDB, and Node.js bases.

Mobile developers create applications for smartwatches, mobile phones and tablets on Android and iOS platforms that are popular today. These specialists operate in Java software language, the most widely used and reliable programming language.

UI/UX designers. A UI/UX Designer is a creative specialist that designs user interfaces. Designers have to know the basics of graphic design and programming, plus have artistic taste and understand the psychology of color. The most in-demand tools are Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Principle, Adobe Illustrator, and After Effects.

QA specialists. The QA specialist deals with technical quality assurance. Software development processes and fault identification are his domain.

Business analyst. His task is to study the customer’s business in order to improve development productivity. The analyst looks for acute business problems and develops methods to solve them.

In addition to those specialists the team should also include:

Project manager is responsible to ensure the coherence of work during the development of the order. In simple words, PM has to plan the work, build and manage specialists, track the project development process, coordinate communication between the departments, resolve all obstacles and present a product to the customer by the deadline.

Data scientists have the responsibility for developing the process of data modeling to build algorithms and predictive models. They also do user analyses.

Solutions architects work on improving technical solutions for businesses, on their design and development, and then implement them in the workflow.

Why does your business need a Dedicated Development Team?

DTM is most useful for working with complicated and long-term development projects.

Working with a DTM is suitable in such cases:

the project represents multiple complex stages of work, such as flexible software development;
requirements and project scope will be determined in the process of product development;
the team is expected to be completely absorbed into the project and its details;
the customer wants to manage the hired team as his own. During the course of work, it may be necessary to change the team size;
the working pace may be increased, but there might be a lack of time and resources to involve and educate a new team.

Where to find the Right Dedicated Team?

Companies (e.g., Brights) that provide specialists to work on various projects usually have a website with reviews, sometimes a page on social networks.

Developers who made the top 5 are located in Poland, Slovakia, Mexico, Ukraine, and Hungary. Ukrainian IT specialists are constantly improving their qualifications, which allowed them to get into the top five.

There are over 183,000 registered IT specialists in Ukraine today, based on data from the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.

Choosing a provider step by step:

Researching in detail

Rating B2B platforms are worth checking out. Among those is the famous Clutch.co, it enables users to view different companies’ profiles and feedback from clients via filters. Service providers also post their offers on GoodFirms, IT Firms, Manifest, SoftwareWorld, and many others.

Consulting with industry experts

It is also possible to get advice from industry experts, search through the reviews and contact those who have left them.

Searching the previous project

Each of the provider companies has its own portfolio, which allows to find their previous works. By analyzing them, the customer will understand whether it meets the necessary requests or not.

Interviewing the selected provider company

An interview is a very important and responsible stage — the customer needs to describe as clearly as possible what qualities he wants to see in the specialists of the future team, the result will depend on it. The interview consists of several steps, the first is a phone call. It usually takes up to 30 minutes, enough to get a first impression of the candidate.

The next step is a video call to test the candidate’s hard and soft skills. To do this, you need to connect by video with a company consultant who knows what a CTO does. A technical director gets hired in order to reduce risk without quality loss. Specialists should have good soft skills to cooperate with the team effectively.

How does it work?

Specialists should be assigned according to required experience and skills. Teams that show better experience and skills require higher payment than junior teams.

Depending on the specifics of the project, dedicated teams can work on the customer side, remotely on their company’s side, or a combination of both schemes of interaction.

DTM allows either to replace the entire staff or to organize joint work with the internal team, providing a clear division of responsibility.

The team of specialists keeps accounts for the customer. Also, they are keeping in touch on a daily basis with the use of web tools like skype, Asana, Trello, and Basecamp, thereby increasing cohesion and understanding of tasks.

The customer can always get in touch with the team, make adjustments to assignments, fire, or hire specialists.

The difference between outsourcing and DTM is that specialists are involved only in the work provided by the customer. They have no other tasks.

Advantages of the dedicated team model

The advantages of working with the DTM are enough to make it stand out among other types of partnership.

Transparency in the process of communication.

The customer can always contact the specialists who work in his team. He passes new requirements, makes adjustments to the project, and receives feedback from the specialists. As a result, the team has a deeper appreciation of the tasks and goals of the project.

Specialists are deep inside the project.

The team is centered on one project only. They do not undertake additional orders from other customers (a kind of outsourcing), they do not work separately. In fact, the specialists of the team represent one mechanism, working cohesively on 1 project. It works as if the developer had hired full-time specialists on his staff.

No necessity to employ and educate new staff.

No need to spend time and resources on searching for and training new employees to your staff. The customer is able to save time. Actually, specialists are employed by their service provider company, but in fact, they are engaged in a developer’s project, who buys their labor. The provider trains these specialists. The customer only chooses the experts according to the specific requirements for his team.

Fixed monthly payment (depends on the team size and skills).

For this reason, the choice of a dedicated team is very beneficial for long-term projects with a high workload.

Minimal customer involvement in the administration and management of the work.

The supplier company takes responsibility for the office where the customer’s team works and for other administrative tasks. The customer is involved only in matters of important decisions that have a direct influence on the work on the project. There are no worries such as office rent, equipment purchases, energy payments, etc.

Ability to place team specialists remotely.

The possibility of placing specialists remotely (outside the office) is a major asset for the project. This reduces office rental costs and minimizes problems that may arise from the coronavirus, for example, and delays the completion of tasks.

Disadvantages of the dedicated team model

High prices.

Stable price. It is based on the selected experts in the customer’s team, as well as on their skills and qualifications. When a project has a complex structure, you will need higher skilled specialists, not juniors. Therefore, it will cost much more to hire specialists for a complex project than to hire them for an easy project.

The customer pays even when there is no team workload.

The larger a project is, the more likely the team of experts is to be constantly engaged.

Conclusions

The dedicated team model makes a significant breakthrough in outsourcing. Operating with a dedicated team model offers a perfect opportunity for the customer to involve qualified professionals in his project and manage the team, no matter how complex the project is.

Dedicated team works in accordance with the timetable set by the customer. The customer decides where the team will work — at the office or remotely.

Due to the benefits listed above — DTM is the most reliable system of partnership between the customer and the team of experts.

Dedicated Team Model: Definition, Pros and Cons