How to Hire a Dedicated Development Team: A Complete Guide for Businesses for 2022

What is a dedicated team?

A dedicated team model is one of the most popular forms of collaboration between businesses and software development service providers.

When you decide to work with a dedicated team, your chosen service provider assigns a team of carefully selected specialists to do the job for you. All these people will have the required skills and knowledge to run your project.

This team is a natural extension of the staff you already have — and it’s better to treat the team members this way, so that the collaboration works smoothly. Just think of them as of your own remote workers.

A dedicated software development team can consist of various specialists, depending on the needs of the project. These specialists are:

• Developers of all kinds, including front-end and back-end developers; web, mobile, and desktop developers
• Testers and Quality Assurance engineers that are responsible for the quality of the deliverables and releasing the software bug-free
• Business Analysts that analyze your requirements and find the best way to achieve your business goal
• DevOps who automate and integrate processes among developers and other specialists, aiming to shorten the development lifecycle
• UX/UI designers who ensure that the solution looks good and the interface is intuitively clear
• Project Managers who control the budget, the deadlines, and the deliverables

Sometimes your project is a bit different from routine software development projects; it might be audit management software, a complex enterprise system for a large car manufacturer, or a VR video streaming app with machine learning capabilities. This is where you may need to bring in extra forces:

• 3D modelers
• VR designers
• System architects

The list goes on and depends on the needs of the project.

You don’t have to interview and hire programmers by yourself. You start working with a vendor and get a complete team of developers that are focused solely on your project.

Also, their performance is being constantly tracked and evaluated — your vendor ensures the team performs effectively.

Reasons to hire a dedicated development team

Dedicated teams suit various businesses — they are versatile and can solve diverse problems.  Let’s take a look at some situations when hiring remote developers is beneficial:

• Your business does not have the talent required to do the task. You also do not have the time or resources required to go through the recruiting process.
• Your personal team is already busy doing valuable tasks; you don’t want it to change priorities and start a new project.
• You need to build an MVP in a short time to be the first one with the idea.
• You want to go to an unknown market and corner a niche here.
• You have been carrying a project that now has grown to a huge scope.
• You want to free up your own team and set them on a different task.

Let’s look in detail at some particular situations. 

Who are you?

Dedicated Teams work for various businesses, be it startups, mature businesses, large enterprises, digital agencies, and so on. What type of business you are in is less important than the particular needs you want to cover.

What are your needs?

Let’s consider two types of needs: business- and project-related.

Business needs:

• Your in-house team does not have enough human power.
• You have a manager who knows the business task well, but there are no in-house specialists to complete it. 
• You have only a project idea and need both the manager and the developers to run the project for your business.
• Your business needs a specialist with specific expertise for a short time, and you don’t want to hire one full-time.

Project needs:

• It seems the project is going to grow quickly, and soon you will need a team extension, or a person with specific skills.
• The project is long-term and you need a separate dedicated team that will be involved in the project tasks only.
• The project is limited in time and has a fixed scope of work.
• The company is planning to grow and expand.

While business needs speak for themselves, the project ones need further examination.

When your project looks like it will grow quickly, you will definitely need a Dedicated team to approach all the new tasks efficiently. You won’t waste time recruiting people, hand-picking them from many candidates, and so on. Just send your in-house team to do one set of tasks, and a dedicated outsourcing team to help you pick up all the growing work.

When you start a long-term project, there will be a lot of tasks that need to be handled daily. With a dedicated team you can keep calm and see the progress — your in-house team can complete their everyday tasks, and a dedicated team will develop the project for you.

Working with a fixed scope of work, you always know how much time will it take to complete the project. A dedicated team will provide a thorough estimate of the task, and you will only pay for the result.

Owning a business that you plan to grow and expand can be tough in terms of hiring the required talent. You either will use a dedicated team you already work with as a helping hand in new-member onboarding or will extend the team to cope with the growing tasks.

Andrei Kazakevich
Head of Production
at HQSoftware

And a fresh hint: if you are going to expand to the market of the country where your remote team is located, you already have a trusted partner there. Ask them about the market and other country specificities.

When not to hire a dedicated team

This overview wouldn’t be fair if it didn’t mention some drawbacks, and there are few.

• You have an extremely limited budget, along with a growing business.

If your business is growing and developing, but you don’t want to spend more money on your solution when required, this will be a huge minus to working with a dedicated team. A solution for a growing business will probably need new features or code adjustment.

So if you don’t want to spend money on these services, you won’t be happy with the results of a team’s work. Not because the team has done something wrong, but because the solution isn’t suitable for your expanded business anymore.

• You have created an extremely detailed project scope by yourself

If you do have a strong vision of your future project and have described every detail of every feature, and you won’t compromise on any of these, then a dedicated team approach isn’t a good choice for you. It will be more efficient and cost-effective for you to choose a fixed-price model.

• The vendor is not trustworthy

Cooperation on a project needs to be built on trust to get the expected outcome. When that trust isn’t there, the whole mission can be jeopardized.

Unlike other cooperation models, a dedicated team model is like a long-time commitment, and you can’t have one without trust.

As you can see, it’s easy to avoid problematic situations and turn to dedicated teams only at the right time and when your project needs this type of collaboration the most.

Pros of working with dedicated teams

Outsourcing your software development tasks and working with a dedicated team brings certain advantages:

Cost-efficient choice

If you search for developers’ salaries, you will probably learn that your local ones cost a lot — and hiring a team of such specialists will probably burden your budget.

Salaries vary, but the average rate of an in-house developer is up to $75 per hour, according to a Fullstack Labs report. If you choose to outsource, you may pay up to $50 per hour of work without compromising quality. Some European countries are known for their outsourcing services and affordable prices.

Flexible working hours

A dedicated team is well trained to deal with challenges that arise in your projects; they have done this before and know how to respond. Also, most of the time, dedicated teams work according to flexible methodologies that allow for adjusting features of the product, as well as the deadlines and budget.

Predictable price

Outsourcing companies will provide you with an estimate for your project. At this stage, you will already have a good idea of how much you will spend — the accuracy of estimates provided by an experienced vendor is often more than 70%. The other 30% depends on circumstances that are not always controllable, or subject to your preferences.

No hiring expenses

The vendor you are working with already has a pool of developers to offer for your project. They are hand-picked candidates with the required skill and talent to run a project like yours.

It is way easier to hire an offshore dedicated team from your outsourcing vendor; you pay only for the project itself. There are no hiring expenses, no recruiting fuss, and even the onboarding process is mostly done by your vendor. You just need to help.

The team is committed to your business

When hiring a new employee, you expect a certain level of commitment. The exact same thing is expected from a dedicated team, and you will get it — just make sure your team understands the business purpose of the project.

You can achieve this by various means of communication, including providing feedback on time, or allowing your dedicated team to have access to stakeholders.

Easy management, transparent communication

An offshore dedicated team and your in-house team have much in common. You manage them both directly, and you can communicate with them at any time. There are also no intermediaries in the working process, so both parties will avoid misunderstanding.

Plus, there is a project manager that controls everything that happens on the project. Thanks to the manager, you will always know what your team is doing and what kind of progress it’s making.

This is why outsourcing is a good fit for everyone, be it a startup or a large-cap. We will offer some examples below.

What are some companies that outsource software development projects?

These are some good examples of famous brands who entrusted their IT development tasks to dedicated teams:

WhatsApp

This is one of the most popular messaging apps. The company decided to outsource all development to keep costs low. As a result, the application was built by professionals from Eastern Europe. As you can observe, everything went well. WhatsApp is used everywhere around the globe.

Slack

At the beginning of 2019, Slack hit 10 million users. The company outsourced the general design concept and redeveloped the app, logo, and a website. As you know, Slack has become extremely popular among developers and other professional communities.

Skype

Skype has become a part of our lives, to the point that you can say you’re going “to skype someone” and everyone knows what you mean. In 2003, Skype’s founders outsourced the development of the back-end to Estonian professionals, who created the core set of features that we still use. Later, Skype was acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion — that’s how promising this app was. This was one of the first success stories that has drawn attention to European outsourcing vendors, especially those from Estonia, Belarus, and nearby countries.

Where to hire a dedicated development Team

So let’s get down to business and talk about how to choose a dedicated development team. Where can you find a dedicated team of developers? There are options:

B2B portals and research agency websites 

There are portals such as Clutch that aggregate data on outsourcing vendors. These websites can help you a lot in searching for the right company. Here you will find client reviews, project business cases, developer rates, and some additional info.

Such websites often have lists of top developers by industry, technology, country and so on. This will help you make the right decision.

Other portals you might have a look at: GoodFirms, ThinkMobiles, CIO Review.

Freelance websites

Independent developers, offshore software development teams, and software development companies usually have profiles on websites for freelancers. If you conduct a thorough search through such websites, you will probably find a company that suits you.

Visit Upwork, Freelancer, Jooble, and Guru for such companies.

Simple Google search

Google can also tell you something about how to find a dedicated team. Software development vendors that provide dedicated teams are eager to have their websites appear at the top of the search results, so you can just search for the required services and probably find a company that catches your eye. Just examine their website and don’t forget to do extra googling for customer reviews.

How much does it cost to hire dedicated developers?

Now, when you know how to find programmers, another important factor to consider is, of course, the cost. Usually, developers’ salaries depend on their hourly rates. This rate will also be used to charge you for their services.

As I have said before, you can find company profiles on vendor aggregators such as Clutch. They will include data on developer’s rates, and this is more reliable information than the kind you will find on the Internet by googling terms such as “how much does it cost to hire a programmer in Europe.”

You have probably heard about countries that are famous for their software development services; such countries typically offer good terms for the IT sector that help startup software companies.

Let’s compare the developers’ rates in different countries. We will look at salaries in the US and UK, comparing them to the rates in Easter Europe, where software developers are famous for moderate prices, good communication skills, and strong engineering skills.

The rates are the following:

• US: $53/hour
• UK: $42/hour 
• Poland: $38/hour
• Ukraine: $35/hour
• Belarus: $30/hour

It is easy to have the right tools at hand to search for the right dedicated team, once you have decided to hire one. Now let’s talk about how dedicated teams are set up and how to manage them.

How to manage a remote dedicated team

Once you have found dedicated developers you are ready to hire, learn more about the setup process and what skills you need to obtain to manage remote offshore teams.

Setup process

Usually, this process is the same everywhere, so I will describe the core stages.

• The vendor gathers requirements. At HQSoftware, we ask you for all the details you have on your upcoming project and from that prepare a free individual proposal. The proposal often includes details on the team’s composition and how the project will be carried out. 
• The vendor builds a team for you. Often companies have specialists who may suit your project and are currently unoccupied. If not, the company hires developers specifically for you or contacts the development partner to hire required talent faster. 
• The team needs to be integrated smoothly into your company processes or a project already underway. There are plenty of options: either you can visit the vendor’s office to personally meet your team, or a team can go to your office for knowledge transfer and a personal meeting. It is mostly up to you to choose what management approach to implement, what tools to use, and so on. 
• The team answers directly to you and works like your in-house team. The outsourcing company does all the administrative tasks for you.

You are nearly ready to start your project.

Legal questions

Your vendor is usually the one who takes care of all legal aspects of your cooperation. You will be provided with a set of documents that legally enforce how the project goes, and what will you receive in the end. The typical set of documents includes the following:

• Proposal. This document describes everything the vendor has to offer you regarding your requirements and project details. You either decline or accept the proposal and move on.
• NDA. A Non-Disclosure Agreement ensures that your development team will not share internal sensitive data. The NDA states what data is confidential and what the penalty is for data disclosure.
• Service Level Agreement. In simple words, this document describes what deliverables the dedicated team will provide. It also describes quality requirements, availability, and both parties’ responsibilities. 
• Project plan. This piece documents planning assumptions and decisions, project scope and deadlines, and how communication among project stakeholders may be executed. This document guides both project execution and control.
• Full-functional specification. Here you will find a detailed description of all functions and components of your future completed product. 

As you see, there are plenty of documents to cover your back in case something goes wrong. You will always have a legal confirmation of what your solution will be, when it will be delivered, who owns the rights to it, and so on.

Management tips

It may seem hard to manage a team that you don’t see at your office. Moreover, they are probably in a different country, even in a drastically different time zone. But don’t worry — it’s not a problem once you know what to do:

• Schedule standups
  On these online video or voice meetings, you will simply have a quick chat with your team and ask them a set of questions: What has been done so far? What challenges do they have to overcome? What are they planning to do tomorrow?You can either do this daily or choose a different schedule that suits you. Such meetings help you and your team have a structured means of conveying information on how the project is going. Just remember to keep things short and simple — don’t deviate from the conversation plan too much.
• Remember to use the tools
  Have a look at the tools you can use to keep track of your project. If you’re working with a dedicated team for the first time, get acquainted with the tools your team and you will use:
  • Jira, Asana, Twoodo, Wrike, and other for task management
  • Google Drive, Bit.ai, and other for document collaboration
  • Skype, Slack, Zoom, UberConference, and other communication tools
• Remember who you hired
  What I mean is, you have hired a team of professionals that have been doing their job for years — they have built and deployed several projects before you hired them, and they know what to do. You don’t have to think of them as a younger and less competent part of your in-house team.Just trust their expertise and control the result — that’s it.
• Learn how to provide feedback
  The more responsive you are, the better will be your skills in managing a dedicated team. Your offshore developers may have questions, and your answers to them may define how the project goes further.

Tips on managing dedicated teams.

If you don’t provide valuable feedback in time, the team will probably procrastinate because they simply don’t know what to do next. This will drastically slow down the development process.

Dedicated teams don’t require much effort to manage, and with a bit of enthusiasm and the right tools you will handle this.

How we can help you build dedicated development teams

HQSoftware has a profound experience of collaborating with our clients on a dedicated team model:

• HQSoftware has been providing software development services for 20 years. We have successfully delivered numerous projects in different domains, overcoming technical and business challenges.
• We have our headquarters located in Tallinn (Estonia), a front office in New York (USA), and a dedicated development center in Minsk (Belarus). 
• Our development team has around 90 professionals ready to work for you. We can cooperate on different models like fixed budget, time and material, and dedicated teams.
• We build custom desktop, web, and mobile applications, as well as customize and enhance legacy software to suit your needs. We offer software development services for such domains like insurance, finance, e-learning, healthcare, real estate, telecom, and so on.
• HQsoftware developers also have deep expertise in implementing AI and ML, AR/VR, and IoT in software solutions.

If you are looking for a remote dev team to build your project, reach out to us. Let’s discuss your ideas and figure out how we can help you.

How we can help you build dedicated development teams.