Want to hire a dedicated remote development team? Great idea, as it has been one of the top work trends of the past ten years. With technological advancements and the further proliferation of remote work culture, dedicated software teams are on their way to becoming even more commonplace.
But the question remains: is outsourcing development right for you? About 70% of companies choose this approach to cut costs, 40% for more flexibility, and 20% for increased speed to market. So, what’s going to be your reason?
In this post, we’ll weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing web and mobile development to dedicated teams, what to do if you’ve decided to work with a team halfway across the world, and some of our best practices.
As a reliable software development vendor providing numerous clients with top-notch dedicated teams, ExpertTal can elaborate on this topic. Or we can simply supply you with the experts you need. But let’s get back to the article and learn more about a dedicated team model.
Regarding software development, the term remote team means that your team works remotely from your central office. Besides, this team works in other offices that may be located in other countries. Here the main difference between the remote dev team and the in-house team is that they work in different office locations.
A dedicated team definition refers to the business model in which the service provider supplies a client with a remote team for long-term cooperation. The remote vendor also chooses the best candidates according to the client’s requirements for workers’ skillsets and experience.
In general, remote refers to any employees working outside of your office. And the dedicated model indicates a remote team that meets your requirements and is ready to work with you as long as possible.
The adoption of remote and dedicated teams in your business changes the way you may boost your digital branding dramatically.
Hiring a remote software dedicated team has numerous strengths. For most businesses, the decision will come down to increased time to market and the cost savings associated with outstaffing.
Let’s examine some potential benefits of engaging dedicated remote staff in closer detail.
The primary reason to consider a dedicated staff, at least if you are putting it together yourself, is that you can build your dev team from less competitive markets than those close to you.
When there are no physical boundaries to your search parameters, you access talent pools of IT outsourcing destinations worldwide. That means you can hire even more skilled employees while paying them less and engage the whole dedicated team much faster.
It’s also true that, in many cases, getting your product to market won’t take as long if you use a dedicated team. The hiring time is less, the team productivity is higher, and the development process is faster, resulting in a quick product release.
Again, this speaks to how content your team members are and how easily they can handle the work in the dedicated team model.
Dedicated team members usually are more satisfied with work as they work in one company longer than the in-house team members. Therefore, you’ll be better able to retain them than employees who work at a brick-and-mortar location. As a result, the company has less turnover and spends less on recruiting costs.
It’s also worth mentioning that when you use a dedicated team, it usually means that your IT costs will be less. Usually, you can switch to the less competitive markets, hire developers there and spend less for employees’ payoffs.
Again, you don’t need to pay anything for the office rent and maintenance, equipment, and other administrative costs. Even more, by working on a dedicated team model, you can reduce the taxes you pay.
Besides, these are not all the benefits you get from having a dedicated team, but the main ones. Hence, if these advantages seem to be substantial for your company, let’s cover the cases when a remote team is the best fit for your business model.
The first question to ask is whether you feel the need to physically meet with your team members often, occasionally, or never. There are some employers or projects where having face-to-face meetings with team members is critical. If that’s where you find yourself, then a remote dedicated team will probably not be appropriate.
You’ll also need to consider whether the development team members you need for your project are physically close to you. For various reasons, there are parts of the country, and indeed, of the world, where there is a higher concentration of IT talent than others.
If you’re in a hotbed of developers who you think can handle your project, you probably don’t need to go remote. If that talent isn’t physically close to you, or you need a specialist with a rare skill set, then a remote team might be your only choice.
While these were general tips for choosing a remote dedicated collaboration model, let’s look at more specific cases in which you need a dedicated team.
A dedicated team is perfect for long-term projects. You can engage the necessary specialists immediately, and the cooperation model will ensure the loyalty and reliability of their work.
As mentioned, you significantly reduce your costs by engaging a dedicated team. If your budget is limited, such cooperation is a great way to get quality services at a reasonable price.
When you feel your company needs to change the vector of development, a dedicated model is your best option for attracting employees. In this way, you can get the necessary team in the shortest possible time and start implementing changes immediately.
Now, look at cases where remote dedicated teams may not be your best fit.
Although you can hire an entire dedicated team for a short-term project, it’s not reasonable. For such cases, freelancers or individual developers who quickly implement your ideas may suit you better.
If you have lower-priority projects to implement, a dedicated team is unlikely to be suitable for such a task. These specialists need constant feedback and supervision, which may distract you from more critical business operations.
Depending on your project and the BPO provider you choose, you may or may not have the ability to interview the team you’ll be working with. If you want to build your own managed dedicated software development team, you’ve come to the right place.
At ExpertTal, we encourage our clients to work with developers directly and stay involved in the hiring process to ensure the right candidate fills each role. We’ll offer candidates we think are good fits, and the client approves them after an interview. It allows you to bypass the most time-consuming and likely-to-fail stages of hiring developers.
Focus on the technical questions immediately — you need to ensure the person you’re interviewing has the necessary skills to get the job done. Ask about similar projects they’ve worked on, what pitfalls they encountered, and how they dealt with them. Make sure you ask about what process they follow, whether they consider their work creative, and if they have any ideas about the project at hand right away. It’ll help you judge whether they can be a good team member.
In our experience, there is no correct way to manage a software-dedicated team remotely. Yet, there are a few best practices to follow that ensure the project stays on track. As with all managerial solutions, the key to success is proper communication.
It would help if you were selective about those you hire. For example, you can ask for recommendations, check their working profiles, and ask to do test tasks to choose the best candidates. But once you do, you need to trust them to get the job done.
It’s prudent to set up rules for communicating within the project. Depending on how much of the managerial role you delegate to the vendor’s PM, this can be either your job or theirs. In any case, determining the tech stack and related responsibilities will ensure you hit the ground running and stay on track until work on the project is finished.
If you’ve ever been on a Zoom call with ten people or more, you know it can be a snooze-fest. People stay quiet unless they hear their name, keep their webcams off, and are most likely just waiting for the call to end so they can go back to doing their job with no intrusions. This situation should be a huge red flag for any manager.
Here’s what you do if you want to manage dedicated software developers remotely:
When you hire dedicated remote developers, it’s a good idea to screen your future teammates for self-organization. That’s just one of the ways you can ensure they don’t lose focus or motivation to provide their best at work. Here’s what else you can do:
Choose the right software development methodology for your team, depending on the project requirement. But we recommend looking at an Agile approach that will probably make the most sense for your remote team.
Applying, for example, Scrum helps you build transparent communication and enough flexible work that boosts the flexibility and productivity of teams. Stick to building Agile teams with each member’s roles and the entire process accordingly.
Set up your team’s informational system with GitHub or Redmine. You can add all needed documentation on projects, integrate it with CMS, plugins, and stream activities like commit messages, and pull requests from Git.
Work at building a united development culture. That means communicating decisions to all team members and minimizing friction during onboarding. Have a clear vision of the goal that everyone understands, and create guidelines for filing effective bug reports.
Determine what remote team-building activity makes the most sense based on your project and goals. Some remote team icebreakers might include getting-to-know-you games at the start of the project.
Of course, you may experience issues when managing remote dedicated software development teams. Learn about potential challenges beforehand to avoid them in the future.
The first challenge with the dedicated team model is having your workers in a different time zone. While this will probably allow the project to proceed faster, it’ll also be hard to have real-time meetings with all team members. You’ll have to figure out some strategies for getting around this issue, like finding the best time in the morning or evening or staggered meeting times.
Effective remote team collaboration means building one consistent workflow and a system of rapport among the members. The longer your team works together, the more used to each other’s methodologies and expectations they will become. However, a new team working on your project will have to get used to each other.
You’ll need to figure out whatever support platform, technology stacks, etc., will be the most useful based on your project goals. It would help if you ensured that the entire team is on board with whatever framework, programming languages, and tools you choose.
If they aren’t comfortable or familiar with them, substituting team members or using a different team might prove necessary. Make sure you choose the one with all the features you need.
If you’re thinking about how to build a culture in a remote team, try to get creative with it. Besides, if your team works remotely, you need to set up the workflow, policies, and rules in a way that should be clear for everyone. Try to build a friendly environment within your team.
When people ask how to build a remote software dedicated staff, they typically think of a team of coders working side by side, producing code that magically turns into a usable application by the end.
That’s not far from the truth, but the reality is a bit more complex, and the traditional structure of a development team is rather rigid. Look at the professionals you must engage for sure.
It’s a senior person on any given project. In the context of building a remote software dedicated team, this is typically the client or a representative of the client.
The product owner is responsible for conveying and maintaining the vision for the product under development to team members and communicating with all stakeholders.
The product owner is typically endowed with the power to make decisions on the project to align processes with business goals. Not having such a professional on board can result in miscommunication, directionless developers, and unnecessary overwork.
The PM’s job is to stay on top of every project task and ensure that every action taken by the team is within scope, including budgetary requirements. They are responsible for communications within the team, taking care of any motivation issues, filling roles if any are vacated during the project, and answering everyone’s questions.
The architect is typically the most experienced developer on the team. They make high-level choices, like deciding what tech stack to use, separating the project into its parts, and ensuring developers’ adherence to high code standards.
Coders are the “boots on the ground” of the software development process. They typically follow a clear set of directions from the PM, architect, and TL and submit work in batches called commits.
Developers are separated by coding functions and programming languages. Front-end developers are responsible for the user-facing part of the product, back-end developers create the server-side frameworks that facilitate the product’s functionality, and so-called full-stack developers can perform either function, sometimes both.
If you need custom services for your business, especially with the use of CRM systems remotely on your mobile, you should consult enterprise mobile app development companies to get the wider picture regarding what to consider when implementing this type of technology in your everyday business.
The QA engineer is responsible for finding the bugs in each new iteration of the product during and after the development phase. Depending on the project’s scope, the team can have a single QA specialist reporting to the project manager and product owner or multiple QA engineers reporting to the QA lead.
The designer has the task of creating the look and feel of the application under development. Again, just like with the QA role, the number of designers on a project can grow with its scope.
Here are all the steps you need to follow to build a remote software dedicated team for any project you may have in mind.
Simply put: we’ve been around for long enough to know what to do and what not to do under any circumstances, but we are still a young and hungry company. Our clients get the best of both worlds. We’re still at the point where we’re earning our laurels rather than resting on them.
A dedicated team brings numerous benefits to your business, making it worth the resources and efforts you put in first.
From our ExpertTal experience, we can say that a well-established workflow, transparent communication, and mutual feedback exchange are the keys to effective dedicated team management.
If you still have questions or want to switch to a dedicated team model. For that, we can help you build a high-performing dedicated development team for your needs, and feel free to contact us to ask any questions.
Kamal Rastogi is a serial IT entrepreneur with 25 yrs plus experience. Currently his focus area is Data Science business, ERP Consulting, IT Staffing and Experttal.com (Fastest growing US based platform to hire verified / Risk Compliant Expert IT resources from talent rich countries like India, Romania, Philippines etc...directly). His firms service clients like KPMG, Deloitte, EnY, Samsung, Wipro, NCR Corporation etc in India and USA.