Better For Betterment – A Dedicated Development Team Or Shared Resources?
It is quite price-wise for the client to differentiate between shared resources and dedicated development teams as the wrong choice may wreak havoc but ensuring high level of service and a right choice will never defeat plans or blur the vision.
Price. Shared resources as well as dedicated teams care about their reputation, as it influences their price. But shared resources are more affordable and are said to be good money-savers. They can be cheaper than teams as they sometimes can’t even load one engineer full-time. The clients usually pay for the time used and for the fixed pay. These resources also benefit from cost savings through negotiated discounts.
Quality of the work done either by the shared resources or the dedicated development team could be different. It should be regulated by the quality assurance system and may depend on the form of collaboration. Quality of either of the shared resources’ or dedicated development teams’ work must correspond to the criteria worked out and based on the requirements. Engineers in dedicated teams working on the product can watch its quality growing or decreasing long-term and respond to the problems appearing quickly. This continuous execution of the quality process and fixing hot points makes the process of achievement of the quality smooth. Shared resources mostly work on short projects and don’t follow the progression and / or consequences of the decisions made.
Skills and expertise of both shared resources and dedicated development teams make the reputation of the level of the service they provide or the product they make, and certainly influence customer experience. To be precise, shared resources’ area of knowledge is more superficial, as they are focused on the tasks set. They may have little knowledge about business. Dedicated development teams not only provide multiple areas of expertise and master the knowledge acquired but also care about business aims and needs. Due to the cumulative effect these teams become flexible, receptive and adaptive to new challenges.
The control is challengeable with both shared resources and dedicated development teams. Working with shared resources the client has little influence on prioritizing and planning of the work to be done, allocating their time or overloading of the specialists because of overlapping of the tasks from different customers. The client’s tasks can be at the bottom of the list, or the quantity of the hours of some specific specialists could be resold several times. Doing with shared resources, the client has to work with the management of the shared resources who are aware of their organizational priorities or can act in case of the slip. While with the dedicated teams it is vice versa.
Commitment and dedication. Dedicated development teams are characterized by full dedication. Dedicated resources live and breathe your business. They work directly and exclusively for the customer’s business and are thoroughly trained about it. So the customer gets undivided attention to the projects the dedicated development team works with. The poor control and insignificant influence of the client on the shared resources, their attention shared between numerous clients make these resources less dedicated to the projects they work with.
Availability of shared resources is usually flexible. The customer has to negotiate the shared resource’s availability, i.e. when and where the person’s hours are available. The degree of sharing the resource influences the changes themselves and their quantity during the project. As the resource is shared, the customer may not even know who exactly they discuss business with, as people may change. Still, availability can be maximized to provide increased scope and quality of the service. Dedicated development teams are always at your service, well-managed, face-to-face, providing access to regular support by permanent staff with just one definite person as a point of contact.
Security is important and must be monitored. It is easier to manage security within a dedicated team, as the team follows the regulations of security policy of only one client. It leads to little or no probability of intellectual property theft. The conflict of interests is more characteristic of shared resources. It happens to the engineers working simultaneously with several projects from the same domain.
Communication. All resources are usually involved in communication. They cooperate and interact with the clients. Shared resources usually have intermediaries – leads. They help engineers switch between the projects and not be distracted from work. The model of the dedicated development team makes the realization of the task easier, as any engineer may contact with the client, keeping the communication channel open.
Written by Anna Kotliarova, marketing specialist
