Dedicated Development Teams: Pros and Cons to Consider in 2024

For the past few years, nearly every aspect of our lives has switched to a remote format. Software development is no exception. Since the COVID-19 disruption, dedicated development teams have become a common way of adapting to new conditions and staying competitive while taming development costs. 

However, dedicated development is not all sunshine and rainbows – at least, not always. That’s why, in this article, we focus not only on the benefits of this collaboration model but also on its weaknesses, which, with proper skill, can be turned into strengths.

Why has a dedicated team model become popular?

Navigating organizations through uncertain times of political and economic headwinds requires business owners to remain flexible and resilient. How? One way is by outsourcing digital endeavors to dedicated tech specialists.

In 2019, only 17% of the US-based IT specialists worked fully remotely. During the pandemic outbreak, this number increased to 44%. 

At the time, such a drastic transition was a forced measure, and companies were concerned about the productivity level of remote staff. However, they soon discovered that 83% of employees stayed as effective as they were back at the office or even increased their productivity. Therefore, it’s not surprising that in 2022, even after the pandemic receded, 35% of US employees were working entirely remotely.

If arranging remote work isn’t a problem, then why not look for developers outside the country, where software development services are more affordable and the talent pool is larger?

Significant reduction in development costs is one of the main reasons why dedicated development teams have become so popular. Let’s review this and the other benefits in more detail. 

Five superpowers of a dedicated development team

Dedicated remote development can strengthen your expertise, increase capacity, and boost the speed of delivery. You can leverage a dedicated team instead of hiring full-time in-house employees and maintaining your own IT department if your business isn’t related to software development.

At the same time, if you run a tech company, you can as well benefit from outsourcing to lighten the load on your in-house team or supplement your staff’s skill set with the expertise needed for a specific project.

What advantages do you get in both cases?

1. Cost-effectiveness without compromising the product’s quality

Since the remote working format is now an industry standard and it doesn’t affect work efficiency, then why pay a US-based developer $130K a year when you can hire a Poland-based one with the same seniority level, expertise, and fluent English for $40K?

By hiring a dedicated team of developers on the global market, clients save substantial money while keeping the quality of the product high. Speaking of the quality of development, here’s what one of our clients says:

They have used very advanced libraries, techniques, and coding paradigms. So the advantage is that we get reusable, well-testable, and well-maintained code.

— Richard Lohwasser, Co-founder and CEO, Lition

The dedicated software development team’s profitability also manifests in zero operational overheads. The companies didn’t have to pay for office space, cleaning, and utilities (water, electricity, Wi-Fi). For example, if you rented an office for 50 people in Philadelphia, you could have saved at least $240,000 a year with a shift to remote working.

Moreover, all costs for training, onboarding, vacations, and sick leave of the dedicated team members are covered by your technology vendor. You pay only for the developers’ working hours.

2. Easy access to a global talent pool 

The ongoing global talent shortage is one of the worst in recent history. The ManpowerGroup research reveals that in 2022 the talent crunch in the US reached 74%, and IT professionals rank first on the list of in-demand roles. One of the ways you can cover this gap is by turning to the external market and leveraging a dedicated development team model.  

One of our clients, who needed to undergo software modernization to obtain ISO 27001 certification, required a dedicated back-end development team of specialists familiar with both their outdated framework and the most up-to-date solution they wanted to adopt.

They approached *instinctools as in the country where the company is headquartered, the talent shortage is high, and finding the right experts at a reasonable price proved to be challenging.  

Besides empowering your IT department with experts in any technology, you can tackle various projects in different niches. Be it customer or enterprise software products, web or mobile applications, full-fledged BI systems or embedded analytics, and whatnot, with a dedicated IT partner you can broaden your expertise in any direction. 

3. Painless and quick scaling up and down 

How much effort do you put into hiring a full-time employee? Imagine taking advantage of no-fuss hiring without searching for candidates, interviewing them, and providing redundancy payments to laid-off employees. 

With a dedicated development model, your vendor is ready to provide you with a team and scale it on demand in a matter of days. For example, when starting a project, you plan to have a dedicated web development team of five members, but a month before the deadline, it becomes clear that you need two more developers to meet the deadline. Your vendor will ensure you have additional specialists the next day.

Here’s what one of our clients, who needed a Quality Management System, says about the *instinctools’ dedicated teams ability to scale:

I’ve been impressed by the available skillset, the flexibility to ramp up resources quickly, and the scalability to extend development teams on short notice. We had a tight delivery deadline, and *instinctools has been able to find another developer and assign them to our project the next day. And we’ve been able to deliver this project successfully.

— Tim Rosenberger, Director of Global R&D, SpecTec

4. Faster time to market 

The ability to grow your dedicated development team at the drop of a hat ensures faster time to market. 

If you compare the number of new applications published on Google Play and the Apple App Store in the last few months, it becomes clear that relying only on the quality of the product isn’t enough. To stay competitive and release a product before similar apps hit the market, you should focus on the speed of delivery. 

The speed of development was one of the prime requirements of our client, Bonnet. They wanted to create a unique application that would help find the nearest charging point for EV drivers all over Europe. And *instinctools’ dedicated development team delivered the application for iOS and Android in six months. 

The app turned out to be so successful that besides being appreciated by drivers of electric cars, Bonnet caught the attention of GeniePoint, the third largest rapid electric vehicle charging network in the UK, who offered them a partnership.  

5. Flexibility 

A software development dedicated team adjusts to your methodology and development process, tapping into your work management and development tools, from Jira to GitHub. 

Our company advocates for the Agile development methodology with its user-centric approach to help you meet end-users’ expectations. We use several Agile frameworks and techniques: 

• Kanban – to visualize each development process step to grasp the whole project and spot bottlenecks quickly and easily.
• Scrum – to deliver value incrementally. 
• Scaled agile frameworks (SAFe) – to leverage Agile Release Train for multi-geography teams.
• Lean – to eliminate waste, such as bureaucratic processes, unnecessary features, and redundant code.
• Extreme programming – to make customer satisfaction and its continuous improvement the backbone of the software development process.

A dedicated team will meet any of your project-related expectations. Requirements can be standard, such as allowing authorized access only when working on a project, or specific, when, for example, it’s necessary for a dedicated team of developers to pass a drug test once every few months. 

Overcoming the possible hurdles of a dedicated development team

As promising as the benefits of a dedicated development model may be, this approach isn’t a cure-all and has its own issues. But are they unsolvable? Spoiler alert from our client, Luca Marić from Infinum:

Any issues that we came across were resolved through clear communication. Instinctools has a very problem-solving-oriented attitude.

1. Not suitable for short-term projects 

Before jumping at the project, your dedicated development team will need about two weeks for onboarding and diving into your infrastructure and another two weeks for offboarding at the end of the project. 

When an entire project lasts several years, extending it by a month and paying the vendor team for that time doesn’t significantly impact your time to market and budget. However, if your project lasts only 4–6 months, hiring a dedicated team will increase its cost by 15–20%. Therefore, technology vendors usually don’t provide dedicated software development teams for less than six months. 

If you have a short-term project, it’s more cost-effective to opt for IT staff augmentation services when you supplement your existing teams with a vendor’s business analysts, mobile developers, DevOps engineers, software developers, QA specialists, product designers, etc.   

2. Assembling the team can take time

Only huge vendors can guarantee that they’ll provide a complete team from the very beginning of the project. It’s more common for the part of the dedicated development team to start working while the vendor recruits the rest of the team. 

For example, you need a dedicated application development team of ten specialists — middle and senior-level developers, a business analyst, a product designer, and a QA engineer. Let’s say your vendor can provide you with five developers, a business analyst, a QA, and a designer at once, which will be enough to work on the application for the first 3–4 months. The vendor is obliged to find two more developers during that time.

The thing is that finding the right specialists within the USA and Western European job markets is complicated. Dedicated remote teams are hired in countries where the supply and demand for IT professionals are about the same, and there is no such intense talent shortage. For instance, in 2022, the average time to hire a software engineer in the US was 66 days, while in European countries, such as Poland, it took 37 days to close the same position.  

3. Security risks due to in-depth team integration

When you work with a dedicated team, you are letting a third party inside your system to some degree. Therefore, you should secure your data and cooperation with a team. This can be achieved, for example, by using dongles — special devices that the dedicated team of developers receives to decrypt the content in your software and unlock its functionality.

As for *instinctools, we adhere to the DevSecOps approach to prevent your software from hacking. However, if you need the highest level of security possible, you can leverage an offshore development center. In this case, we can provide an offshore dedicated development team with private office space, a secure perimeter, software access control, etc.

Make the most of your dedicated development team

Whether you can’t afford an in-house development team, have a long-term project with frequently changing requirements, lack the necessary expertise, or need to speed up the work to release the project on time, dedicated development is what you should opt for. 

However, to ensure secure and efficient cooperation, it’s vital to choose a vendor who can provide you with a well-rounded team and will strictly adhere to your requirements.