What Should be the Structure of Your Dedicated Software Development Team?

The task of structuring a dedicated software development team has never been an easy task but to build a successful software project you need a team that has the ability to create something out of the ordinary. This team consists of professionals who have the ideal productive and scalable idea that shapes up the project efficiently and increases the ROI of your business.

However, while building a dedicated software development team’s structure, you need to take care of certain aspects, such as team size, type of development team, who is the right role for the professional in the team, and other essential factors that have a direct impact on the team.

Once you have built the dedicated development team in the right way with its vital factors then you are certainly ready to conquer the software world with your project. A dedicated developers team structure is a structure in which the project is outsourced to remote developers. Hence, the structuring process of a dedicated software development team is an essential part of a valuable and successful project in the market, especially when you are dealing with outsourced development teams.

Also, an ideal software development team structure means accomplishing projects faster and ultimately the success of your business. In this post, we’re going to explain how your dedicated software development teams need to structure their work, how to assign the roles and responsibilities to each team member, alongside all the significant aspects that build a team and you will have the best team in the market.

1. Structure Your Dedicated Software Development Team

It is established that around 75% of software projects fail due to not structuring the project in the perfect way. An ideal and effective team, with transparent communication, clear functions, roles, responsibility, and the importance of team members, all these factors lead the team to achieve the goal.

There are various researches that have proved that constant communication and collaboration with each member are the most beneficial aspects for complete project success.

However, for the perfect software team you need a perfect structure plan, let’s dive in and see how you will have the finest dedicated development team for a precious project of your business.

Determine the Most Suitable Team Model:

To structure development teams, first, we need to start with determining the development team model. Determining the right team model of work for creating your software is the prime and most vital step. 

Any matter for developing a custom software solution is surely individual, and these three below given models help to structure the best development team.

1. The Fixed Price model:  This team model guarantees the delivery of the software services as per the pre-defined timeframe and pre-agreed accounts. Moreover, it also reduces the reliance on the recruitment company.

2. The Time and Material Model: Time & Material model is normally determined in man-hours and then given in cash according to the cost of every expert’s working hour.

3. Dedicated Team Model: Dedicated team model is established on the concept of having a remote dedicated development team devoted to the success of your project. Also, the dedicated team model is ideal for outsourcing services for software development, where clients can easily hire employees by outsourcing a software development company for a specific project and release after its completion. Let’s explore why it is one of the best.

What is a dedicated team model?

A dedicated team model is set up as per the project requirement for a specific project, and the pricing is also determined as per the product instead of the experts’ abilities.

The significance of having a dedicated development team can’t be overlooked. The client’s part in the design of the dedicated model is more hands-on compared to the Fixed Price model.

Besides, the dedicated team model provides better management whenever complicated situations happen, which is essential in software development projects with agile methodologies. Also, dedicated teams will help you to filter out the best tech stack for your projects among thousands of agile technologies in the market, they will choose the most suitable tools for your project with cost-effectiveness at its core.

The dedicated team model has a very manageable and translucent pricing system. You will need to do the monthly payments which will depend on the size of a remote team provided by the development company. When you hire dedicated developers the payment will comprise members’ salaries plus the service provider’s cost, which covers companies’ expenses.

These remote experts are determined according to the requirements of the customer for their knowledge and skill sets. The client may choose to lead teams from their end or to authorize the service provider’s project director to regulate the communication method. Hire a dedicated team of developers who usually works from the services provider agency.

With a dedicated team model, you can have the constant evolution of the long-term projects and can observe them through the client and manage with the dedicated project team as per the expectation of the client.

However, the Dedicated team model is less efficient when it comes to short-term projects. Hiring a dedicated team that is right for your project might take a lot of time and effort. If we hire dedicated developers from an offshore company, different time zones can become a major issue, though it can be easily solved by applying agile development principles.

So, before you decide to go ahead with a dedicated team model you need to do an in-depth exploration of all the pros and cons of this model, that way you will be able to determine whether the choice you made is right or not.

1.1 Pick the Development Team Type

The first thing while structuring a dedicated team you need to decide is the type of development team for your project and you need to know exactly what business goals you want to achieve. Additionally, determine: Does your project need a dedicated team?

This first step will help you to establish a perfect software development team and be the biggest part of the success of your project.  

These are the main three types of the software development team:

1. Generalists

They are solutions for everything. Generalists possess a spectrum of tech knowledge and expertise. These types of dedicated teams are built for maintaining end-to-end solutions.

Each member of the project team can provide a complete solution to any problem. However, the only problem with this type of team is you can’t expect high-level expertise in a certain domain. They might not be as much as knowledgeable and skilled as a proficient professional in that domain.

2. Specialists

Contrary to generalists, this type of team comprises highly skilled professionals in a particular field. And having specialists in a team means they address a specific topic with their knowledge and expertise, which means you will get more efficient and productive work.

However, the problem in this team is a lack of communication among employees. There is a possibility that the professional might not understand what the other team members expect them to do in a project, and that might lessen the efficiency and quality of the services provided by them.

3. Hybrid Team

It is a dream team for software companies. Hybrid means a mixture of two strong sources. Here a hybrid team means a combination of Generalist and Specialist teams. So this team combines the best of two functional parts of the specialists and generalists teams.

In this team, specialists focus on the functional part, and generalists converge on the communication and cooperation inside the team.

1.2 Decide the Right Team Size

The next section is to decide the size of your dedicated team. A lot of people assume that there might be the possibility that a larger team means more productivity and the better the software development team structure means the best outcome.

However, it is a proven fact that large teams are less efficient than smaller ones. Larger teams need extra communication channels, which sometimes lead to miscommunication and unorganized management.

Make a list of what types of professionals are essential for your project and then gather them through the right software development company. There, is no perfect size but 5-7 employees in one team are the most efficient dedicated team.

Although, if the project is large then you need more team members, in that case, you should try outsourcing the required professionals and divide them into multiple small cross-functional independent teams with a team leader. Hiring a team of dedicated developers containing specialists such as project managers, business analysts, quality assurance testers, a team of developers and front-end designers will be more efficient than recruiting an in-house team for your dedicated project.

1.3 Assign the Correct Development Roles

The structure of any software development team depends on assigning the right roles to responsible and suitable professionals, who can take care of their responsibilities. To cope with the requirements, clients must take full control and choose teams with special tech skill sets.

The dedicated development team structure is designed in such a manner that allows the project to constantly evolve. Understanding the role of each standard dedicated team member in teams helps you to find a suitable expert for the project. A dedicated development team is made up of people who are committed and work with a dedication towards the project for which they are hired. Let’s take a look at the most important software development roles in the team structure and how the team might act when you hire a dedicated team.

• Project Manager: The first member of this team you need to find is a project manager, they are responsible for managing and leading the dedicated team. Moreover, project managers are accountable for the entire project scope. Consequently, a manager possesses the skills to efficiently optimize the work of the team and ensure all the requirements of the team are fulfilled.
• Business Analysts: Business analyst applies their skills and assists to modify projects from their beginning through expediting communication between development teams and executives. As the connection between IT and the business, expedite the solution for stakeholders, control processes, outline requirements of long-term projects for developers, and utilize data analytics to produce data-based support. Active communication is what secures accomplished teams’ work; it enables the client to save sources on management while empowering teams to release quality-driven software on time with moderate cost, advanced tech stack, and according to necessities.
• Software Architects: They are highly skilled software developers, who think within all the aspects of the project and make high-level design choices, alongside determining the essential tech stacks for the project.  
• Developers: Whether it is developers or software engineers, they are dedicated team members, who practice their tech skills and knowledge of engineering and programming languages for agile software development.
• UX UI Designers: These team members ensure that the product is secure and comfortable for users to use. So they do research and user interviews to design a user-friendly product.  
• QA (Quality Assurance) Tester: The responsibility of software testing and security is on QA specialists. They are the ones in the dedicated team who can give green signals for using this product.

1.4 Keep Documentation Updated and Easy to Manage

One of the most essential factors for structuring dedicated teams is finalizing the right way to document every process of the project, especially when you are outsourcing instead of hiring an in-house team.

Whether it’s business or technical documentation, they should be applicable to the project’s current state and keep the team in the loop for the project progression and help in better project management.  

The documentation helps to make meeting notes, coding, and UX standards designing easy also it’ll raises the compatibility of the dedicated team’s work.

The best method is to use information management software for available document storage along with filtering and real-time collaboration.

Another thing, if you are operating a dedicated development team from a leading software outsourcing development company like TatvaSoft. Then make sure they always render documentation on the software development process.

1.5 Make Communication a Priority

Communication is one of the factors that could make the best team or destroy the base of the software development team.

Even if you have all the other components right on the path and accurately functioning. But if there is no strong communication among dedicated development team members then it can adequately harm your product. And the whole process within giving time to recover it.  

No matter how efficient they are in their work but lack amount of time interacting with each other can lead to the failure of the project and an increase in product development time..

And when your dedicated team members efficiently communicate their needs and project requirements among each other. It certainly heightens their collaboration and increases the work process overall.

Communication also stimulates creativity and innovation inside the dedicated teams. It becomes essential while discuss the project’s specifications and requirements with stakeholders, it helps to negotiate the due date.

1.6 Use Communication Apps to Establish Offline Interaction

The last part of structuring a dedicated team is implanting the application to make the communication effective. As we determined how lack of communication can fail the project.

So, to build transparent communication channels you need a productive communication environment for the dedicated software development team.

For that, a dedicated team needs to use various collaboration apps such as Slack, Krisp.ai, and Appear.in, Skype, Zoom, etc. With these applications you can message instantly, which is way quicker than emails or discussing assignments in workflow management software, it lets the team share opinions, and concerns and address the working progress plus and negative points.

Also, offline interaction raises a team’s performance. Open discussions alongside project debriefings maintain close communication gaps among the team and ascertain a trustworthy working culture, it will give the in-house team vibe even though the team will be far away from you.

2. Should You Use a Dedicated Team Structure For Your Projects?

In the end, hiring professionals for a software project is not sufficient pre-planning. Startups and big enterprises can consider hiring a dedicated team for their long-term projects. The dedicated model is one of the most agile and commonly used approaches for companies having long-term projects although, all the aspects such as client unsure about budget, time of launch, or target market of the whole project are essential to take into consideration. However, it is affordable and more beneficial to hire a dedicated team.

Understand one fact teamwork is complex yet important for the scope of the project. A dedicated development team offers an agile development solution. So structuring the software development team in the right way companies take care of one concern. Despite providing a plethora of benefits, a dedicated development team model has a few drawbacks which we need to consider and find certain solutions to structure the best-dedicated team for our project. Hiring a dedicated team will make the next phase of project development of your company easier with time.