What is the Essence of a Dedicated Development Team?

A dedicated development team means a team of specialists that consists of programmers, designers, project managers, and/or QA specialists who are engaged only on your project. In contrast to freelancers and other temporary contractors, this team becomes a part of your business, with full integration into your functioning and company development strategy.

The business that runs large-scale, domain-specific projects that are repetitive and need constant advancement, maintenance, and expansion should adapt to the dedicated team model. It offers flexibility and uniformity and is hugely committed to your projects’ success.

Why You Should Consider Hiring a Dedicated Development Team?

1. Cost Efficiency

Outsourcing is expensive; it takes time and money to recruit an in-house dedicated team, train them, and later provide them with benefits and overhead expenses. Outsourcing can actually be even cheaper than regular hiring as the customer gets the professional services they require without having to pay for the overall team’s salary. A lot of organizations opt for outsourcing of these teams to either nearshore or offshore facilities because labor costs are usually cheaper while it does not have to compromise the quality.

2. Access to Global Talent

Whenever you are working with a dedicated development team, you are not constrained by the location. This allows you to employ professionals from all over the world who will be the best for the project. This global reach enables businesses to engage highly skilled professionals who specialize in a certain development innovation area.

3. Focus on Core Business

Outsourcing development is advantageous in that you minimize your in-house activity to developmental work by allocating your resources to other important functions in your enterprise, including marketing, customer relations, and planning. The committed team handles all technical aspects of your assignment so that you can focus on business development.

4. Scalability and Flexibility

As projects are initiated, there surfaces a need for scalability – for scaling up or scaling down. A dedicated team permits the manipulation of the total number of human resources differently according to the peculiarities of a project. Knowing that when you start a new feature or have to take on a new challenge, you have the team to grow with your business is something I consider essential.

How to Hire a Dedicated Development Team: 5 Steps Roadmap

1. Define your project requirements

The first thing that you need to decide before hiring, is the parameters of the project, objectives, and technical specifications that it should meet. They include project size, the type of skills required, and the time required in the project delivery process. That’s why, if you provide detailed requirements, you’ll be able to find the right team and give the development team a clear understanding of your expectations.

2. Choose a suitable cooperation model

As with other outsourcing strategies, there are several options regarding how the client deals with a dedicated development team. The most common ones include:

• Time & Materials: In this computing model, you are charged by the number of hours expended and by the resources consumed. This is flexible and ideal where the project is long-term or likely to change and evolve over time.
• Fixed Price: A cost estimate of a fixed amount of money that will cover the work to be done in the project. This type of model is suitable where the project is small, the scope is well defined, and tangible products are to be delivered.

Dedicated Team: You employ a team for a specific project that takes a certain amount of time to complete usually where it is large or is continuing. The team deals strictly with your project and is flexible according to your requirements in the process.

3. Assess team’s expertise

It is important that you want technical experts with experience and knowledge of the particular areas that you require. Assess the developers’ skills in languages, frameworks, and tools that you are going to build your application. Another emerging attribute is the competencies of the team’s ‘’people’’ soft skills − communication, planning, cooperation, and problem-solving which, depending on results, might strongly influence the efficiency of collaboration.

4. Go through the portfolio and testimonials

Screen potential teams regarding their overall experience or previous work samples as well as their specialization in projects similar to your own. A client should be able to provide contacts of other clients for the provider under consideration so as to have an opinion on their performance, reliability and satisfaction levels.

5. Establish the smooth communication 

When providing service by implementing dedicated teams, it is therefore important to engage in effective communication. People should utilize online project management and communication instruments like Slack, Jira, or Trello to report on their work progress, share responsibilities, and stay current. The internal team and the dedicated team should meet regularly to share updates and status reports.

Cost of Hiring a Dedicated Development Team in 2024

The cost of a dedicated development team services depends on factors in regard to the location of the team, the level of project difficulty, and the specialization of the team members. Below is an approximate cost breakdown for hiring a dedicated development team in 2024:

• Junior Developers: $25 – $50 per hour
• Mid-level Developers: $50 – $100 per hour
• Senior Developers: $100 – $150 per hour
• UI/UX Designers: $40 – $100 per hour
• Project Managers: $50 – $120 per hour
• QA Engineers: $30 – $70 per hour

Bear in mind that these rates differ depending on geographical locations. For instance, those professionals working in Eastern Europe or Latin America may be willing to charge lower amounts per hour than those working in North America or Western Europe, yet they will get similar or even better results.

When Should you Apply for a Dedicated Development team?

• Long-Term Projects: If your project will span months or even years, then forming a dedicated team will be of great importance since there will always be a ready team of people who will work on the project.
• Complex Applications: In complex projects with various specific demands, as well as in projects where multiple integrations and functions are required, separate teams guarantee that all issues will be solved correctly.
• Scaling Needs: If the plan is to grow the project at any point in the future, it allows for easy addition of team members.
• Lack of In-House Expertise: If your internal group lacks the technical knowledge necessary for your project, hiring a dedicated team is an opportunity to acquire the necessary expertise without hiring employees directly into your company.

Summing Up

Building a dedicated development team will benefit companies that carry out the scaling process efficiently, maintain a subtle connection between the costs and revenue, and attract the best talents worldwide. If you have a large project that will extend over several months or years, this model suits your needs. If you are a company with a product that requires constant serving, this model has the versatility to feed your needs. When you are specific about your project needs and select a suitable engagement model and your team members, your team and project work in the right direction.

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Such surveys serve a positive purpose, but sometimes they appear “anonymous” instead of anonymous. Sometimes, employers use this term just nominally but, in fact, fire employees for their honest responses. 

In this post, you’ll be able to overview anonymous surveys phenomenon, their impact on internal cooperative culture, and the methods to improve trust between staff members and employers in more detail.

How Anonymous Surveys Work and Why Employees Are Fired?

The primary purpose of any enterprise’s internal anonymous survey is to gather valuable insight from employees without revealing their identities. The anonymity factor always stimulates people to provide more candid feedback streamed to improve particular work aspects.

This tactic may facilitate significant improvements like well-managed and transparent communication, swifter and easier problem-solving tactics development, improved job retention and satisfaction rates, guidance of strategic decisions, etc. 

Nevertheless, this method allows companies to focus on resolving a specific issue, targeting one problematic area instead of working on amorphous changes that are usually left unnoticed.

In recent years, the public became aware of incidents when workforce members (respondents) were fired for taking unnamed surveys. Such actions may harm employees and the company, bringing bitterness and toxic traits to a corporate culture and depriving valuable insights for company’s future growth.

Here are some common reasons why employers fire their staff based on their responses:

Companies’ internal culture. Sometimes, a company’s culture sadly may not be based on mutual respect, and constructive feedback and open communication may not be valued. This becomes an issue as the employer perceives any kind of critical consumption as a threat and chooses to terminate the employee.

Pseudo anonymity. Quite often, surveys that are meant to be anonymous may still reveal the identity of a respondent. An employer may take actions based on previous biases that occurred with a particular employee instead of considering the message of actual feedback.

Retaliation. The management might use such surveys as an instrument against the workers who raised concerns and criticized their practices.

Lack of understanding. The majority of firing cases show that the employers may not fully understand the primary purpose of surveying. An employer may see candid feedback as an insult rather than an opportunity for future improvement.

Budget restrictions. In situations when cutting-cost measures are needed, for some employers, firing employees is the easiest method. In that way, the survey results may be taken as an excuse for reducing the workforce.

These facts became a starting point for employees to mistrust and simply refuse to take anonymous surveys. Some people have had a dissatisfying past experience, while others have seen such a situation involving a friend or a colleague. Let’s see and analyze the most widespread reason for employees to avoid participating in anonymous surveying. 

Reasons Employees May Avoid Taking Anonymous Surveys

The core reasons are mostly based on strong misunderstandings and communicational issues. As practice shows, their concerns may appear valid. Let’s dive deeper and extract the primary problematics.

Mistrust

As discussed before, employees may doubt the promise of complete anonymity. By avoiding participation, they may attempt to protect themselves from the responses being tracked back to them and the following aftermath with the management.

Fear of negative feedback

Sometimes, even if the anonymity is reassured, the worker may still have particular prejudices. This may be connected to the fear of negative feedback from colleagues or supervisors and their possible negative perception of the answers.

Particular skepticism

In addition to the previously mentioned aspects, let’s imagine an individual who already has taken such surveys. The person shared their candid feedback, then went through a hard discussion with management and still hasn’t noticed tangible changes. Sure enough, their expectations failed, and it will probably be useless for them to give it another chance as nothing changes.

The belief in insignificance

Stemming from the previous reasoning, some employees may not fully comprehend their importance. Such beliefs are usually widespread in large organizations and companies, where a particular employee’s voice may be lost in masses of other individuals.

Core internal corporate culture issues

Some enterprises might have a history of punitive actions that may significantly affect employees’ trust. Their concerns may be connected to proper anonymity safeguarding and the consequent unpredictability of the management actions.

Despite all these factors, gathering employees’ feedback anonymously may deliver significant positive outcomes to the organization’s efficiency and communicational environment. So, let’s see how it is possible to improve employees’ trust rate and obtain a mutual understanding of the survey’s purpose.

5 Ways to Engage Employees to Take Anonymous Surveys

Besides creating a welcoming work environment, you can do a couple of things to build trust and strong communication.

Ensure true anonymity

It’s crucial to   deliver the message that the employees will receive complete anonymity, and their identity won’t be revealed. It’s advisable to replace the term ‘anonymity’ with ‘confidentiality’ as this will be perceived as something more secure and will encourage honest feedback.

Definition and analysis of patterns

While analyzing the responses, define the regularity of spotting particular patterns instead of focusing on individual opinions. This enables the full overview of the repeating issue and then the swifter decision-making on how to resolve it.

Implement HRM software

HRM or Human Resource Management software development and implementation may decrease misunderstandings and improve communication. This digital tool is utilized to manage HR functions and boost their completion efficiency.

HRMs help to assure true anonymity by gathering answers without linking them to a particular person, encouraging workers to be more frank in their responses. Nevertheless, such a solution helps to establish high transparency, letting employees know how and for what purposes their data will be used. Also, HRM software allows managers to define systematic issues, providing wide analysis and, in response, showing employees what actions were taken based on their input.

Management training

Guiding management in perceiving and analyzing feedback constructively is necessary without exaggeration. The obtained skills will help them to focus on professional interaction, minimizing the possibility of taking things personally and softening their reaction to negative responses.

Improvement prioritizing

The main goal of any anonymous surveying is to gather internal insight to increase the company’s functioning quality and efficiency. Also, the organization’s internal culture’s main priority has to be a high value of employees’ opinions. 

Surveying is all about identifying the issue and working on it for a positive change. Such perception allows separate personal relationships and professional communication, helping enterprises extract the use out of candid employees’ responses.

Summing Up

Anonymous surveys, while intended to gather candid feedback for organizational improvement, can sometimes lead to employee terminations due to pseudo-anonymity, retaliation, and misunderstandings. These practices foster mistrust and reluctance among workers to participate, harming both employee morale and company culture. By ensuring true anonymity, implementing HRM software, and training management, companies can rebuild trust and effectively utilize employee feedback for positive change.

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Let us imagine the situation. You implement BPMS in your IT architecture. But the implementer keeps pushing back the deadlines for the final deployment, and the business processes that were supposed to start at the MVP stage are executed incorrectly.

What to do in this situation: “finish” the project with the current team, change the project executor, look for mistakes on your side? Will any of these solutions aggravate the situation?

We do IT development on request, and we often receive requests to continue a project from other IT companies. During the time we have worked on such projects, we have learned that we should not get excited about such requests: often there are systemic problems in project management which the contractor is unable to solve alone.

In the most simplified form, outsourcing in IT is built approximately according to the following scheme: setting a task – re-setting the task – execution. The client, in the person of his manager or project team, assigns tasks to the contractor. The contractor, again through his manager or project team, processes these tasks, analyzes the requirements, formulates an action plan for his specialists.

A problem can arise at any part of this chain. Let us consider each of them in more detail.
Problems in task formulation

There is a problem with the culture of project management in development. IT processes cannot be managed in the same way as, say, a warehouse or a factory – you need completely different methodologies.

For example, there are the following four types of systems:

Streamlined simple – the result is clear and predictable, there are already examples of successful practices to achieve it, the input conditions and requirements for the result do not change. For example, the task “to build a house” is clear and measurable, it does not raise questions for specialists.

Complex – the task is not unique, the desired result is approximately clear, but the best practices in solving similar problems have not yet emerged. The task “to build a city in a swamp” is solved with the help of successful practices in construction, supplemented by common sense and engineering thought.

Confusing – the system has increased uncertainty, the result is affected by changing factors and risks that must be responded to. The understanding of the ideal outcome changes with these factors. Now the team has to build a city on the surface of Mars, optimize its delivery cost, work out life support systems, compensate for possible risks and system failures.

Chaotic – there is no understanding of either the outcome or the best practices to achieve it. Conditions and priorities are constantly changing. Management and the team react to them ad hoc. The task in the example gets complicated to “build a universal dwelling module, which could be “deployed” on the surface of any planet – a gas giant, a planet with a high temperature, an Earth-type planet. No one has yet solved such a problem, so it is unclear what materials, technologies, shapes, etc. would be optimal.

Each system has its own peculiarities, each requires a different approach. If the wrong management format is chosen, the project can simply fall apart.

What is a problem statement in IT? When there is a task to paint the walls, there are no risks. When there is a task to deliver goods, the process is also largely predictable. In IT the implementation of something is the beginning of figuring out how it should be done.

You can, of course, try to manage a messy environment like a complex one – by preparing terms of reference and everything else (see Cynefin framework, Toyota Tao, Agile Manifesto, etc.). But we’ve never seen a single terms of reference in our lives that matched the final implementation, nor have we seen a single agreed-upon design layout that wasn’t adjusted during implementation.

And since we’re dealing with a convoluted system where specific jobs will be constantly changing and refining, we should have project goals and their measurable metrics agreed upon with all team members – this will ensure that we don’t lose focus.

If you’re managing a project as a complex project, the team doesn’t know the goals and metrics and only sees the tasks you set. A lot of business analysts have already worked on the task at the time you set it, a lot of time has been spent on pointless discussions about project architecture (it is useful to discuss project architecture, but bureaucracy should not be a priority).

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Remote work presents new challenges. Contractors are far from the customer, now you can not look them inquisitively in the eyes to assess how much they themselves believe in the named deadlines. Weekly phone calls, our favorite management tool, do not give us a feeling of sufficient control. And there is no assurance that deadlines will be met. First, every week, the project manager cheerfully reports that everything is going according to plan, and then suddenly without a declaration of war it turns out that the deadline has already been broken.

An experienced customer, of course, is able to suspect something wrong at an earlier stage, based on body language and uncertainty of speech of the manager, but for this you need personal contact. So what to do? Let’s rack our brains together.

My order, my rules.

The one who pays is the one who makes the rules. So let’s not be lazy to set them. It is quite reasonable to inform all participants, that the customer will adequately perceive and perhaps even encourage for the timely warning of possible deadlines and other problems. Justified, of course, by some signals and changes inside or outside the project, even if intuitively.

It is quite logical to explain to all project participants that advance warning will allow risk management, to take corrective actions. And most importantly, it puts all project participants on the same side of the barricades: “all together against the problem,” rather than “customer against performers trying to justify failure to meet deadlines.

On the contrary, draconian sanctions can be imposed for failure to meet deadlines and the onset of problems without early warning. If they tried to prevent the failure, but could not, it happens. But if you didn’t even try because you didn’t know and didn’t anticipate, that’s a shame.

Operational Metrics.

Ours is an age that demands ever more rapid reactions, more rapid management decisions. Our age demands more and more rapid response, more rapid management decisions. Monitoring the progress of a project at weekly meetings is already too infrequent. But it is also impossible to spend a lot of time. So, we need some indicators, simple but eloquent indicators that give signals on time. Reducing the project buffer, if you are a Goldratt fan, or a trivial combustion chart will allow you to keep your hand on the pulse.

Better yet, set up a “red light” that will light up when the metric deviates from the design metric, prompting the customer and the project team to react in a hurry.

What’s next

And then the main thing is not to stop. Rigidly fixed rules and indicators eventually cease to work. This means that at the end of each incident, problem or even just an undesirable phenomenon it is necessary to adjust the rules, supplement the indicators and look for other solutions.

And also – do not lie to yourself. By admitting our mistakes, we give ourselves a chance to correct them. As long as we are wrong and correct, we are not only living, but also developing.

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1. Agile “rules

Flexibility comes to the forefront both in relation to a single project and to the project portfolio as a whole. Multi-level project plans with grandiose Gantt charts, multi-page documentation, budget-timeline-subject area constraints make projects sluggish barges, whereas fast and maneuverable boats are required.

What needs to be done.

Analyze the business benefits of the project. Answer the questions: can the planned business benefits be achieved in the current environment? How much can they be reduced? How can the project be reformatted to remain cost effective?

Determine the possible losses from exiting the project and relate them to the possible business benefits.

Calculate different possible scenarios for project implementation, revise the subject area.

Re-evaluate the components of project portfolios-projects and programs-with this analysis in mind, and re-prioritize components. Remember that not only projects, but project portfolios should be flexible.

For projects where it’s impossible to switch to Agile methodologies, use hybrid approaches or some useful Agile tools, such as a Kanban board, open-ended questionnaires, daily meetings of project teams (although in an online format), planning poker.

2. being agile means making decisions quickly

In the hierarchy of a particular organization, the project office, portfolio, program, and project managers may not have direct access to the company’s top executives. The managerial weight of the project manager is on average lower than the managerial weight of the functional managers. Therefore, decisions related to project activities are made slowly and are not always justified. It is necessary to speed up the project decision-making cycle.

3. The crisis project manager is a communicator and motivator with good technical intelligence

In a crisis, especially when working remotely, the project manager’s competences in team management and technical intelligence, i.e., knowledge of modern information technologies, are of primary importance. If you remember the phases of team development according to the “Tuckman ladder,” the current situation has put many project teams in the storm phase. Management models through large-scale meetings with a large number of participants do not work in these conditions. First, decisions must be made quickly, and second, project team members must constantly feel engaged and motivated to work so they don’t lose momentum. Instead of long meetings, it is better to hold brief analogues of daily standups, to use methods of collective decision-making. The project manager should pay special attention to employees with low personal motivation, find time for daily contacts with them, and constantly “keep his hand on the pulse.

4. the traditional project office must change

Traditional offices are aimed primarily at the successful implementation of projects by spreading project methodology throughout the company, monitoring the performance of individual projects and the portfolio as a whole, providing interaction with the project teams of third-party performers. The understanding of project success in this case is also traditional: within the previously defined budget, terms and subject area. The motivation systems for project office staff and project managers are most often “tied” to these indicators. As a result, traditional project offices are not very interested in changes, especially significant ones, they are not ready to work in a situation of uncertainty, when you need to make decisions quickly and take responsibility. At the same time, when project offices work remotely, the burden of organizing communications between project teams and stakeholders falls on the project office staff. Activities need to be organized in such a way that project teams are given effective tools for interaction and are not left out of the field of control.

5. Automation becomes a means of survival

Flexible approaches in project and portfolio management do not mean uncontrollability. The needs of company management for information on project activities in times of crisis increase manifold. The use of “zoos” of information systems (IS) by different project teams, leaving the control zone due to remote work, the absence of a single system that accumulates all the information about the project activities make the preparation and provision of such information problematic. That is why it is high time to think about the creation of a corporate project management information system.

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