Better For Betterment – Freelancers Or Dedicated Development Team
Rating reputation of freelancers and dedicated development teams make their price. Freelancers’ portfolios consist of major or middle projects, as a rule. But some exceptions also take place, let’s take Stanford HCI Group which implements their projects using teams of freelancers, for instance. Location of either freelancers or dedicated teams also influences the price. Offshore teams’ price could be less as they are not in-house.
Quality always makes the price. It is hard to define as it is influenced by numerous factors: correspondence to requirements, technical scope of skills and personal qualities. But let’s put aside low-level freelancers and compare best ones. Usually they could be business-minded guys with a set of professional and personal qualities sharing the vendor’s culture. They do generate qualitative products but it could be hard to achieve. For dedicated teams it’s easier, as the company gives the culture, requirements for security and quality. Doing with freelancers everything aforementioned becomes a client’s responsibility.
Skills and expertise are also important concerns. Their amount and level can be absolutely different. To choose freelancers and calculate risks to form the team with the right mix of technical and personal traits can be a challenge for a client and, in fact, becomes their responsibility. With dedicated teams most risks are on vendors, besides dedicated teams consist of different engineers that makes a cumulative effect of proficient level of services and products delivery. That does wonders for a project in particular and bring benefits for the organization in general.
Both a freelancer and a dedicated development team should have obligatory, tangible, face-to-face control. Control is not only communication, meetings and time-tracking. It is also the ability to foresee the nearest future situations. It could be hard with freelancers as it is not always possible to implement predictions and aims mitigation. Also if you work with freelancers, you’ll have to do the main basic things that provided by a vendor such as working schedule and personal attitude formation and concern about group dynamics.
Evidently, availability of dedicated development teams’ members employed on the projects is higher and is always under control as it is managed by the process. That makes communication of a client and the members of the dedicated development teams easier and more efficient and can be the ground for the teams to win the challenges. Availability of a freelancer is limited, i.e. being engaged in multiple projects it is getting less controllable, as they themselves judge on priorities of tasks, projects and clients. As a result, their reaction on topical last-minute changes could be less quick and efficient.
Software dedicated development teams also stand for high level of security and secure environment in a format of the NDA or an office equipment. They surely monitor the security of data, ideas and secrets. At a time, this cannot be said about freelancers. They keep the contracts but office security says nothing to them, and there is low possibility of legal pursuit in case of a disclosure or quitting the job in the middle of the project without someone substituting them. So, a dedicated development team is more reliable and reputed.
The aforementioned idea of a freelancer’s individual work for several clients make customers hesitate about them meeting deadlines, quick response and then about their commitment and dedication whereas software dedicated development teams feel responsibility for deadlines and hot-peak situations.
Being the most crucial part of a development process, real communication, both intercommunication and intracommunication, is a must for both – either a freelancer or a developer, as it can also be a good means of finding solutions, relevant and comprehensive responses within 24 hours and tracking development progress. Communication can be more restricted within a team or faced with an intermediary – a manager. Its length is difficult to trace but adhering to the idea that freelancers tend to short-term clients, the communication will be short relatively. Long-term partnerships with dedicated development teams witness for prolonged face-to-face communication, more detailed and better constructive one.
Written by Anna Kotliarova, marketing specialist
