Dedicated Development Team Services: Definition and Meaning for ISVs

The offshoring dedicated software development team has become a common strategy that is being used by most companies these days, as part of their operations. However, for a greater turnout, a company needs to have a full comprehension of what such a contract entails. Dedicated development team services are an example of such a contract, it is an agreement between a client and a service provider in which the former outsources for services they do not have on a long-term basis.

List of the Content

• What are dedicated development team services?
• Who should use dedicated development team services
• Example of the dedicated software team model project
• Comparison of dedicated team services and other engagement models
• In conclusion

WHAT ARE DEDICATED DEVELOPMENT TEAM SERVICES

The dedicated development team services are usually offered by the software development center outsourcing provider who establishes a group of professionals with specific experience and skills that suit the client’s project demands on the basis of his infrastructure. Thereafter, the client may decide to handle the team by themselves or assign a project manager from the outsourcing services provider or his personnel to manage the team on their behalf.

The main objective of dedicated team services is for the software development team to seamlessly meet the requirements of the clients’ operations. At first, dedicated software developers are usually a working but external part of the company. However, with time, team members blend with the company’s culture, management, and all that it entails to a point where they become part of the company’s personnel staff. They, in turn, share the same goals to make the company better at its operations and produce high-quality products or services.   

The general step-by-step approach to dedicated development team services:

• The client asks the outsourcing provider for a number of specifically skilled and experienced suitable employees for the requirements of their business operations.
• A service provider looks out for such IT professionals and any other individuals required for the group.
• These IT experts are then brought together to form a team and a plan is obviously made for their working hours (it is usually regular working hours).
• The project being long-term, the team continuously works on the project and gets to understand the specifics and most importantly, the general idea of each separate task with an aim that in the end, they produce standard results.

With this model, each client is usually provided with their own dedicated software team. This is usually essential as well as advantageous as the clients can easily put into plan resources and their usage, time, and work volume thus avoiding wastage and getting the maximum benefit. The client is also fully in charge of the team’s progress and workload due to a crystal clear project management together with the convenient and frequent interactions with the team.

ISVs place in this model

Generally, an ISV creates software coinciding with the hardware, software, or a cloud platform provider. Companies that offer platforms such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Apple, AWS, and others, try to prop up ISVs by creating ISV programs for them to develop their own applications that run on their programs. However, it is obvious that some of these companies can create their own applications, so why offshore ISVs? In fact, numerous ISVs collaborate with Microsoft to develop, market, and sell their software for Windows office, Xbox, and Azure.

In most cases, such companies lack resources or the know-how to make the applications that specifically fit every niche requirement or market, therefore, use the ISVs to do so. Some of the ISVs operate under a certain organization or partnership offering platforms for other IT specialists, their goal is to have contracts with companies that can provide for the specialists for their expertise.

Typically, ISVs are not owned by any platform holder and, pitch their products to a primary vendor such as IBM since the latter lacks them directly to the platform’s end users. This allows the client of the vendor who is the third party, to rent the ISV’s software services. ISVs in turn, create competition together with catalyzing the speed of technology innovation and advancement.

Basically, ISV is simply a software company that sells its products to the end-users. These companies can vary in size from such giants as Salesforce to very small organizations of five people developing solutions for a very tight niche. Regardless of the size, they all are facing the same frequent challenges such as high development costs, inability to find required software engineers on the local job marketplace, and lack of experience with some platforms, technologies, hardware, etc. Establishing a dedicated software team on the basis of the outsourcing provider’s resources can be the ultimate solution to all the problems mentioned above. Further, we’ll try to give a dedicated team definition in regards to how it can help ISVs to achieve their primary goals.

WHO SHOULD USE DEDICATED DEVELOPMENT TEAM SERVICES

Dedicated development team services are majorly used by client software vendors or enterprises who have calculated and assessed that owning a project development has more drawbacks and sophistication than offshoring one. Therefore, by hiring a dedicated software team, they are indirectly cutting off avoidable expenses. Also, there are those clients who find it easier to outsource in a service that will continuously and gradually develop to a high-quality final product. For instance, companies with the brands such as Oracle or Microsoft find it cheaper to encourage ISVs to develop software for their platforms.

For complex projects whose requirements will frequently change, dedicated team services are also suitable because first, it usually for long-term projects. Technology itself is known to go obsolete really quickly and you require a team that is enthusiastic to keep up with the changes and enables you to produce standard products. In turn, a dedicated center is there and able to flow with the changes and easily adapt to them.

In addition, startups from America and Europe have financial difficulty hiring software developers from their own countries but find it very affordable to offshore dedicated software developers in a country like Ukraine. Since dedicated development team services have the balance of flexibility and a planned budget regardless of the unclear scope, it is majorly preferred and used by such companies.

Advantages of going for dedicated development team services:

• The dedicated software team over time usually grows to be part of the main personnel which comes together with loyalty.
• A client usually has complete control over the development process and the team itself.
• Since one client usually has their own dedicated team, the team gets to have an intense understanding of the client’s requirements.
• There is an advantageous interaction between the team and the client. The client is able to transparently manage the project using tracking web tools such as Skype, Asana, JIRA, while as for the team, they are able to comprehend the specifics of the project from the day-to-day communication.
• Dedicated development services are one transparent contract. A client can easily manage costs and conduct budget control seamlessly.
• It is also a very flexible model as the scope and workload are not fixed; they can change with time for the sake of keeping up with the world standards or if the client wants to make changes.
• In the end, there is the certainty of team cohesion and stability for the production of a quality product.

The dedicated development team services are known for their transparent and simple pricing system as the software development team is paid monthly by the client. The cost includes the whole team’s salary and the provider’s fee which comprises overheads, administrative and infrastructure expenses.

EXAMPLE OF THE DEDICATED SOFTWARE TEAM MODEL PROJECT

Let’s give a dedicated team definition in the context of the actual and long-lasting project and give a real example of a successful dedicated project. Being a custom software development company EXISTEK is involved in a big number of projects where engagement is based on the dedicated software team model. We’ll take an example of Ligit AS – ISV company located in Norway, which decided to establish a dedicated development center in a remote location to bring fresh blood to the product development process, cut the costs, and overcome the lack of the needed developers in Norway.

Lingit AS is well known for its assistive reading and writing software for people with disabilities such as dyslexia. Over the years their products, including TextPilot, have become an industry standard and helped thousands of people to live and work despite their difficulties with everyday tasks.

This is a short description of the company, but let’s travel back in 2009 and compare the situation to see the dedicated software team can help ISV. Before the beginning of our collaboration, Lingit experienced difficulties with the support and integrations of their products and began to search for the team experienced in the text scraping automation and specific APIs for that. Their search began with the dedicated development team services in Romania, India, and China, but it didn’t work well because of the high staff turnover or just lack of understanding and low quality. After all, they’ve approached EXISTEK and started a pilot project that has been completed with results that exceeded the expectation.

In the case of this project, work has started only with one dedicated .NET developer, but soon the team grew to the dedicated development center of five developers full-time working on Lingit products development, testing, and deployment.

Sverre Andreas Holbye, Lingit AS Product Manager, gives the following dedicated team definition for ISV:

EXISTEK has been working with us for a long time, so they’ve come to know our solution well. They can make suggestions and improve our specifications.

At the start, our dedicated software development team started to work on the text-scrapping module which was critical for the overall work of the web-based .NET application. Over time, when our ISV partner was sure that everything went well with that component, the whole scope of the Windows application development has been passed to the EXISTEK software development team. Also, we’ve been working a lot on the routine activities of the development like numerous integrations required for that kind of reading and writing assistive technology. The work related to the order and licensing components of the Lingit products has been passed to EXISTEK dedicated development center too. During the years of collaboration, our team has got on the inside of all Lingit solutions and become able to make valuable suggestions to the specifications and work on the solutions as a full-fledged part of the organization. As for the management model, we use one manager to render the customer’s requirements to the rest of the team. For project management, we use JIRA, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.

It is worth mentioning the positive influence of our dedicated development team services on the process in general. Among others, Agile and CD have been introduced under the guidance of EXISTEK software engineers and project managers. This allowed Lingit to respond faster to the market requirements and as the result, win the race with the competitors and become the number one solution in their field. Also, we have been performing code refactoring for years and now we can say that there is no technical debt and legacy code in software solutions we’ve been working under the guidance of the Lingit team. The fact that the collaboration has been continuing for almost eight years and the constantly growing size of the team can prove that our partners have achieved their main goals, such as quality improvement and decreasing development costs with the help of our dedicated development team services.

COMPARISON OF DEDICATED TEAM SERVICES AND OTHER ENGAGEMENT MODELS (FIXED PRICE, TIME & MATERIAL)

Fixed Price Model

With this model, change is evil. Unlike the dedicated software team model, there are no given allowances for future changes of the scope throughout the project because of fixed pricing. In addition, the requirements are expected to be so clear that the timeline in finishing the end-product can be determined. The fixed budget made before the starting of the project is to help the client avoid any future unplanned costs. The fixed price model is mainly suitable and beneficial for small or medium-scale organizations as they have limited resources and have to manage what they have properly.  It provides financial safety for them.

In case a client decides to change or when change becomes inevitable, there will be an automatic conflict as the client will have to incur extra costs as the service provider will have to make adjustments off the planned scope. This will require extra resources that had not been budgeted for or extra time. In the process of making all these re-adjustments, a lot will be wasted and in turn, create more stress than business value.

Time and Material (T&M) Model

With dedicated development team services, there is usually planning of how things are to go about in the project, more so with allowance change. However, with time and material models, the flexibility of the process is bigger. It is certainly for a long-term project but with highly dynamic requirements, an unclear scope, and a workload that is expected to vary from time to time. In fact, dedicated software teams are rarely used for this kind of project, and the software developed is usually not sophisticated to requires a lot of dedicated resources. However, the timeframe is usually preliminarily established.

Nevertheless, a client has to provide a transparent definition of the project’s requirements to the developer. This is in the order they can avoid wasting a lot of time on re-doing the work which would result in a lot of resource and time-wasting and the client will have to incur these costs or the developer will get overworked. For this to be avoided, other than providing a clear scope of the project, the client should maintain consistent communication with the team. You can learn more about outsourcing billing models here.

IN CONCLUSION

The bottom line is that dedicated development team services are an ideal and fair approach to use for clients who opt to offshore dedicated software teams large software projects or entire product development. It has the required balance between the other two models, therefore, fair for whatever company as long as the client is out for a high-quality product that remains up to standard with the market requirements.

Investing in a dedicated software team is beneficial for whatever companies whether software development or small and medium-sized business (SMBs). We at EXISTEK, make it our responsibility to ensure that your investment is worth for growth of your business by ensuring you have the most convenient team for you. Visit our dedicated software development team page to learn more about this service or contact us directly to get a consultation from our experts.