Dedicated Development Teams – Benefits and Limitations

When you set out to hire a team of developers, one of the first questions you face is whether to hire a dedicated development team or a remote team. The dedicated team model, called DDT model, looks more professional, but it also turns out to be a costly one.

On the other hand, remote model looks more economic but it has got its own shortcomings. And this choice can make or break your project, so it’s imperative to make it the right way. But don’t worry, because in order to help you make it right way here we’re going to tell you about both sides of the coin – the benefits and limitations of dedicated development teams, that is. Have a look on them before hiring an in-house team of developers. Let’s begin!

Benefits of Dedicated Development Team Model

The DDT model of hiring developers has some major benefits. Here we’re going to tell you about 5 of them:

More control over team

The dedicated development team model provides you more control over your development team. When you have the team members in your office every day, you can actually see what they’re doing most of the time. This can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with remote teams. When you’ve more control over your team members, you can utilize their energies better to complete your projects before time.

Improvement to work culture

If you hire talented people, almost every single person whom you hire brings something valuable to the table. People don’t bring their hard skills alone – they also bring a lot of positivity (or negativity, depending on their nature), connections, humor and other elements to the workplace. With all that stuff they improve the work culture of their workplace, and help in solving various challenges that you can face while managing your project.

Predictable budget

Since you pay a fixed amount as salary to every team member of DDT, your budget remains highly predictable. This helps in better and easier management of your project’s finances, another thing which is highly important for success of any project.

Easier communication

Communicating with dedicated teams also remains much easier than remote teams. You meet them every day, so you can convey them the requirements of your project more easily than you can to remote teams. While working with remote teams you must draft all your emails very carefully and illustratively to convey the project requirements, otherwise the end result may not meet your expectations. On the other hand, members of dedicated teams can be called in for a meeting to convey the requirements easily in a face-to-face interaction.

More dedication

The members of your dedicated team work only on your project, so they’ll be much more dedicated to the success of project than members of a remote team. Every task related to your project will be in their priorities, and every technical failure of your project will be a challenge for the whole team. And that’s precisely how great results are achieved.

So far, so good. However, everything comes with its own limitations, and dedicated development teams are no different. We’ve seen the benefits, now let’s take a look on the limitations.

Limitations of DDT model

The DDT model has got at least as many limitations as benefits. Given below are some of them:

Inefficient for smaller projects

DDT model is not an efficient model for small projects. Unless you’re building something very big which is going to be used by at least hundreds of thousands of users, it’s not a model that will be efficient for your project. Not only money but time and energy will also be wasted by hiring a dedicated team for small projects.

Internal politics

Politics at workplace is not something new. It has been around for ages, and unsurprisingly it can be found in development teams too. Managing it and getting the desired from you development team is also an art, and you’ll have to learn it if you want to have a dedicated team of developers for your project.

Limited pool of talent

When you decide to hire a dedicated development team for your project, the pool of talent that you can tap becomes limited. You can hire the members of your team only from the particular geography in which your office is located. If you’re on a tight budget, this pool of talent becomes even more limited because you can’t afford to poach some talented employees already employed somewhere else.

Lower Flexibility

The more the number of employees in your company, the less flexible your company will be. By adding a dedicated team of developers you add to that inflexibility. You or the manager of team must know how to stay nimble while working with a dedicated team of developers.

Higher Cost

Lastly, it’s a costly affair to have your own dedicated development team . You’ll end up shelling out a lot more than you would with a remote team. Unless your project is a big one that requires constant development work, it’s probably not wise to pay out a ton of money by hiring dedicated team of developers.

Conclusion

As you can see, the DDT model of hiring developers is both good and bad in its own ways. Whether it works for you or not will depend upon the specific requirements of your project. You should not go for it unless you’re working on a very big project that requires constant development work. If you’re just getting started, or if you’re building something small… you’ll be better off with remote development teams. However, if your project requires constant work related to development then it’s crucial for you to hire the best possible development team. So evaluate your requirements and take the decision accordingly.