If you want to launch your own software product but understand that hiring in-house developers is far not the best option for you, it’s high time to choose an outsourcing model that will be the most appropriate for your case. Today many companies prefer to hire dedicated development teams. But is it a good variant for you? Or is it better to consider, for example, the Time and Material or Fixed price models? That’s exactly what we are going to explain in our article.
Hiring dedicated development team
When you hire dedicated development team, it means that you establish cooperation with an outsourcing agency and share your requirements for your future team based on your project peculiarities. You indicate the number of team members, and their desired skills, knowledge, and experience. This team is created by an outsourcing company based on your needs and is fully focused on your tasks.
It is feasible to hire dedicated development team when you have a long-term project but exact requirements are either unclear or you know that they can easily change during the development process. Very often companies hire dedicated development teams when they already have in-house programmers but need to involve additional skills in the development of their products.
As a client, you can control and manage the project realization process but you do not deal with the issues related to hiring, onboarding, and other administrative tasks.
The payments are conducted monthly based on such parameters as team composition and side.
What is the time and material model?
This model offers huge flexibility as it presupposes making payments for the resources and time that actually were spent on the project. This approach allows clients and vendors to introduce changes in the development process and it adapts quite easily to all the updates. Nevertheless, there is one huge disadvantage. Your actual expenses on the project development can significantly differ from the estimations that you usually get before developers start working on your project.
In other words, you pay monthly for the actual work performed within this period.
This model can become a preferable option for long-term projects, especially when you are quite sure that your requirements may be changed dramatically (and maybe even more than once depending on such factors as market situation, business needs, etc.).
Fixed price: when to choose this model
When you are thinking about how to hire software developers, it’s also worth considering the fixed price model. Though it differs quite significantly from the two models mentioned above, it is still quite popular in the business world.
As you can understand from the name of this model, from the very beginning, when you sign a contract, the budget is already fixed. On one hand, it can be very convenient for clients as they can be quite confident that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises for them. On the other hand, this model is believed to be rather risky for programmers who can spend significantly more time on a task than it was planned and this time won’t be paid.
This model is a good choice for short-term projects with limited scope but with set deadlines and clear requirements. Very often, it is chosen for MVP development projects.
Which model is the best?
So, what are you planning to do? Do you want to hire dedicated development team? Or do you prefer to set a fixed budget in advance? Your decision should depend on your company’s business needs. Let’s summarize the pros and cons of these models.
While hiring dedicated development team is a good idea when you have a large long-term project and you want to have high control over the development process, the fixed price model will be suitable in those cases when your project is small and you do not need to control every step of developers. At the same time, the time and materials model is something in the middle between two other options.
We hope that you will make the right choice and will have the best developers ever on your project.