Working with dedicated teams is one of the key ingredients to a successful recipe for delivering projects in an Agile manner. The advantages carried by this model are applying to both the client and the company providing the services, but most importantly it has a big positive impact on the project delivery.

The dedicated teams model ensures:

• Exclusivity and full-time allocation on projects
• Reduced time on prioritization
• Diminished risk in switching context
• Increased team agility
• Better customer collaboration
• More mature and responsible team
• Better planning
• A more mature process
• Faster delivery
• Increased quality 
• A higher level of understanding of the business needs and product

Let’s take a deep dive into the Dedicated Team model and its advantages.

1. Exclusivity and full-time allocation of project

A dedicated team offers you the certainty that the members are working exclusively and full-time for a specific project. In other words, the project is fully covered by a team that can provide support, development, and solve urgent issues with minimized response time.

2. Reduced time on prioritization. Downscale the risk of switching context

The dedicated team model reduces the risks of having to prioritize between projects when an urgent issue appears, while also minimizing the likelihood of spending time on context switches. If a team is not dedicated to a project, we can fairly assume that it’s working on several projects at the same time.

The worst scenario we can imagine is that the projects on which the team works are in urgent need of a feature or support in solving a production incident. It’s easy to understand why in this case a dedicated team would have covered the feature development or the fix faster and with less effort involved from both parties.

Nevertheless, having to switch context between projects increases the time spent on a feature and at the same time decreases the level of attention and therefore can make room for more bugs.

3. Increased Agility

Another reason to hire a dedicated team is that this model comes with improved project agility. Since one of the values promoted by the Agile methodology is “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, having a dedicated team offers our customers the comfort of knowing that they can rely on us and plan new development tasks easier. 

Customer collaboration is much easier when the team is available at all times. Constant reminders of availability and pressure of providing certain answers or information in a specific timeframe (to avoid losing the allocation) are warded off. Prioritization can be done within the project and the team can work on other backlog items until the Product Owner prepares the needed information.

All of these can dramatically increase agility and lead to a better customer experience.

4. Customer collaboration

In time, working with a dedicated team will create a more familiar space. The Product Owner will get to know the team and will be able to discuss directly with them. Basically, hiring a dedicated team can boost customer collaboration and can enable your group of people to reap the benefits of working with an experience that understands processes and targets.

Dealing with changes within the team can cause frustration since sometimes the same information needs to be explained several times. It will also decrease the level of confidence that the project requirements, as well as the history of previous implementations or changes, are well understood. 

5. Serving the project needs with the most suitable skills

Working with a dedicated team means that this unit was formed based on the project’s specific needs and that its members have the right capabilities and skills to handle certain tasks.

When the team needs to be constantly assembled to respond to a variety of requests, then it might take more time to gather the necessary skills. But the dedicated team model ensures resource maximization so that the team will be able to make the most out of the product and technologies.

6. Mature, responsible team

Moving a bit deeper into the subject, having a team formed and working together for a longer period of time will increase the level of Agility and will encourage the team to bond and become more united. It will be easier for them to act as a team, assume deliverables together and offer support to each other. It will also help them in estimating better each time frame since they have spent enough time together to know how to seamlessly handle certain tasks.

This can only add up to the advantages previously presented since it will help better refine and plan the scope of an iteration and it will also increase the level of delivering the right scope.

7. Better planning

Having the team together for longer periods of time will lead to a more stable velocity and better planning of future releases and development. Team members will get more confident in their estimates and these will be more and more accurate. It will be easier this way to plan certain features and future developments.

8. Mature process, fast delivery, increased quality, and high level of understanding of the business needs and product

The team will get to know the project so well that they will always be able to come up with improvements, plus they will know exactly what parts need to be tested when some module or service is being worked on. It will be really easy to provide faster and more qualitative work, pay more attention to details and prevent issues that can occur from working on features with impact on other parts of the application. This way, the entire process becomes more efficient and mature.

If you would like to leverage the benefits of working with a dedicated team, do not hesitate to contact us.