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.
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
In-house development or dedicated development team?
