What is Dedicated Team?

Dedicated Team is a one-of-a-kind collaboration model that combines fixed-price and time-and-materials techniques. It provides you with a long-term remote team of hand-picked professionals, to provide software development services, assigned to your project. The primary goal of this concept is to compensate for a lack of required skills and knowledge in-house. You can manage the team yourself or hire a specialist project manager to help with communication.

Generally, a dedicated team model works best for continuous scalable projects, for the companies that lack time or resources to hire specialists in-house, and for non-tech companies that don't have experience in managing software projects.

The dedicated team cooperation model generally works with monthly payments based on team size, including labour costs and fixed service costs or a margin.

• This is the main pricing model used in agile software development. There is a dedicated team that delivers the product on a regular basis. It is formed according to the required technology expertise and skills, depth of experience, availability, proactivity, communication skills and readiness to communicate directly with the Client.
• If the Client represents an enterprise, it is crucial to quickly integrate with the existing company structure, release cycles, development processes and tools. In case the Client needs to extend their existing core team with new experts, it can be easily done.
• Only high-level requirements and main development directions are clarified.
• There is a weekly or monthly budget, which is formed according to the quantity and ranking of the team members.
• There are clear and documented responsibilities distributed within the team.
• All team members share the goal that corresponds with the Client’s needs: deliver the product regularly with certain defined frequency, capacity and velocity.
• The team is guided by the project manager. But, as opposed to the fixed-price approach, the Client can directly communicate with other team members and participate in the management of the main aspects:
  • Scope (prioritization of features, sprint planning, sprint review)
  • Timeframes and budget (sprint planning, launch planning, involvement of additional developers for parallel work, withdrawing team members)

Actually, the Client may manage any aspect of development, but the Vendor still focuses on development and expertise.

• The Vendor takes over any risks related to Human Resources: provision of substitution for team members in case of vacations, resignations, or sick leaves. Quite often the Vendor has to take care of extra services that can be requested by the Client at their additional cost in cases of emergency: overtimes, non-standard services (e.g. branded design of business cards) and business trips.
• The Client takes over the workload-related risks. The Vendor is interested in provision of effective workload for employees, so a minimal paid workload is set for each team member: full-time for developers, part-time for other roles.

Pros and Cons of Dedicated Team Model