Dedicated Software Development Teams in Software Outsourcing
Dedicated software development teams work solely on client’s projects and closely with the client’s developers and testers. Such teams can extend your company’s in-house software development capacity or add specific knowledge to its existing teams.
Dedicated teams become part of your company and allow you to easily staff your projects.
Developing and testing software apps may take at times more than what in-house teams can handle. When this happens, external dedicated software development teams are a solid choice.
Enterprise service or SaaS providers, small firms or tech startups feel similar pressures to outsource software development and software testing tasks. Decreasing time to market, increasing product quality and adapting to fast-changing market conditions demand quick access to skilled labor. Meeting such stringent demands with internal teams alone may prove difficult. Outsource to dedicated software development teams and make sure your projects meet all the requirments and deadlines.
Thus, this model is among the most reliable forms of software outsourcing for firms of all sizes.
Reasons to Outsource Your Dedicated Software Development Team
Our clients request dedicated software development teams for multiple reasons. Of those, the ones that are most often mentioned and relevant are the:
- software quality ensured by an external dedicated software development team;
- quality management processes of the external provider of software development services;
- difficulty of hiring software engineers in local markets, where filling a spot takes between three and six months on average;
- team stability, which is easier to assure by an nearshore or offshore software development firm than by the client;
- difficulty of developing the software project cleanly, within parameters, only with in-house resources;
- migration to new technologies, for which the client does not have in-house means;
- ease to ramp-up and ramp-down teams;
- cost savings and reduced management burdens;
- costs of meeting broad technical skills with in-house resources;
- security and personal data protection measures put in place by the software outsourcing company;
- need for Agile transformation of the firm and its systems.
We will briefly describe next how we tackled all these aspects and why by choosing to outsource your dedicated software development teams you reduce your overhead and ensure high-quality deliverables.
1. Increased Software Quality with Dedicated Software Development Teams
The reason mentioned most often by our clients is the software quality provided by their external dedicated software development team. Working on solutions for a variety of industries, Fortech gained valuable technical and business know-how.
While doing so, we created effective processes, strict security, and personal data protection measures and attracted skilled people.
The increase in quality noted by our clients is a natural result of our maturity as providers of software development services. Our high and strict quality standards attracted some of our most demanding customers. Thus, meeting their needs led to continuous improvement on both our processes and Fortech’s place in the Romanian IT market.
We started small, with limited know-how, a few people and services and gradually diversified our service portfolio and raised quality. Thus, we focused on constantly investing in operation improvement and project management while growing our core strengths with new skills. Also, we constantly seek to add modern concepts and best practices into our outputs. Thus, we now reached a stage where we can offer full stack IT services.
Clients rely on dedicated teams from Fortech for business analysis, UI & UX design, software development, software testing, and DevOps.
As a result, Fortech is now viewed as a key provider of custom software development both locally and globally.
2. Cost and Effort Decrease with External Dedicated Software Teams
Keeping an in-house team is costlier than hiring external software teams for your projects. The internal team has high recruitment, retention and training costs. Also, you need to add up the office space and computer hardware.
Recruiting in 3-6 months for a post that would take the software firm 1-2 months to fill raises costs. Besides, wages for HR staff can be higher in your country than in the software outsourcing destination.
Furthermore, keeping the internal team happy can prove to be a big challenge.
Expert software firms might be in a better position than you to help its engineers reach their professional goals. In addition, by outsourcing, you don’t need to keep people on the payroll after the end of the project.
In the in-house approach, your engineers must build the teams, processes, and workflows and align to the firm culture. This process takes a long time and puts pressure on your budget.
Building the team will be gradual and address each part of the process/workflow. If one person takes some days off or leaves the firm, their role will stall.
To cope with such a situation, you might need a backup for each key person. This would add a lot to your costs. So, it is only fit when working with an internal team is a better choice.
3. Easy Setup and Management of the Dedicated Software Team
Dedicated Software Team Setup
Challenges with team setup came second in our clients’ list of reasons to rely on software outsourcing. A software development firm can put together teams quickly and secure team stability easily. They often have between 5% and 10% of their specialists on the bench. On the bench, you can find experts who recently completed a project or were purposely set aside for new clients.
The bigger the software firm, the more diverse its bench skills. This helps them model a core team for a new project fast. When the pipeline is not big enough, they can recruit.
It may take from 1 to 3 months to fill the position, depending on their size, prestige and market conditions. On the other hand, in a competitive market, clients usually need 3 times more than us to fill the same spots.
Usually, it’s easier for us than for our clients to replace a specialist that leaves the software development team. Also, we can offer constant support in career growth to our software engineers, keeping employee retention high. The more experts in the firm, the better the chances for professional growth and learning.
The Skills of the Dedicated Software Team
Some of our clients worried that developing the project cleanly and fast, only with in-house means would not be possible. Others voiced their concerns about migration to new technologies (modernization). To meet complex project terms, a perfect balance of technical and business skills, team spirit and processes are needed. A large software firm usually scores well in all these areas.
First, it most likely covers all the basic technologies, as well as a few niche ones. Fortech, for example, has on average 50 to 100 or more experts for .NET, Java, Web, Mobile, and C++ (embedded). The niche technologies in which we specialize include AEM, COBOL, and Teamcenter.
For example, a .NET offshore development team with the right skillset and experience can assure you of the best quality and cost-effective services.
Second, the software firm has acquired broad business expertise and honed its processes throughout the years. Besides, it can offer full-stack services and can easily integrate new or trendy skills when needed.
Ramp-up and Ramp-down of the Dedicated Software Teams
Last comes the ease to ramp-up and ramp-down teams, where a dedicated software development team can help greatly.
Unlike their clients, large software firms can allocate software engineers from closing projects to new openings fast. Even so, it is rarely an option to downsize many people from a dedicated software team at once. If you have a large team assigned to your projects, down-scaling can take several months. Hence, you should plan your projects well in advance and share the plan with the outsourcing firm.
Clean delivery of a project also has to do with the relation between team members. An external firm that relies on an established in-team working process ensures the tasks are assigned correctly. And also the team morale is high. They usually assign to your projects team members that have worked with each other, thus lowering the risk of workplace disputes.
Also, the small cultural differences among team members improve engagement and add to job happiness. Last, most providers enjoy higher retention rates than software product firms due to multiple factors. Of these, the growth contexts and team building events are among the most appealing to software engineers.
4. Staying Competitive in Your Target Markets
Dedicated nearshore or offshore teams achieve the best results when the dedicated team model is combined with the Agile methodology.
For software development projects, Scrum is one of the most empowering tools for remote work. It replaces the written conversation with voice calls and video conferences.
Practice proves that by using Agile, the client gets the following from outsourcing software development projects:
- Iterative planning and development;
- Regular interaction between the client and the dedicated team;
- Early discovery of risks;
- Capacity to find solutions for every problem;
- Continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and processes improvement;
To be competitive, you should focus on the product, on your clients and on growing your revenues. By relying on a dedicated software development team, you will have more time for these aspects.
Besides, outsourcing your dedicated software team can help you boost profits and software quality while reducing overhead. For many firms, tapping into a pool of skilled software developers is the right choice to gain competitive market advantages.