What Are Dedicated Teams? (And Why the Agile Experience Multiplies Their Value)

Deciding that it’s time to offer a new digital product or introduce a suite of new features is an exciting time for any company. This is an opportunity to expand or better define the value a company brings its customers. However, as teams move from the brainstorming stages to logistics, they may realize they don’t have the talent necessary to turn these plans into products. Earlier this year, Gartner found that 64% of CIOs and other tech executives felt lacking the right staff was the biggest barrier to developing new technologies.

As its name implies, dedicated teams provide full teams of IT experts ready to take your product from idea to reality. Often, your company can leave the development entirely up to this third party, freeing your staff to work on other initiatives. Below, learn more about dedicated teams and their distinct benefits to companies like yours. You’ll also learn how Programmers’ Agile Experience multiples the value you see from the average dedicated team.

Defining Dedicated Teams

Some IT consulting firms provide dedicated teams to organizations in exchange for a monthly payment. The client then assigns these teams to independently work on a new technology-related initiative, such as a digital product or a suite of new features. Dedicated teams usually consist of the IT professionals a company will most need to see this product through to deployment. That can include software architects, specialists in both UI and UX, developers, and many others.

Payments to the consulting firm normally recur every month as long as you need the service of their dedicated team. That means even if the timeline for developing your new product is unclear, a dedicated team can be there from beginning to end. You have full control over when you’re finished leveraging their services. These team members are also usually focused entirely on your company’s products, meaning you should have the ability to regularly check in with the group or individual members, encouraging transparency.

What Are the Benefits of Dedicated Teams?

As you can likely already tell, dedicated teams have many advantages. Generally, we can break these pros into two categories: flexibility and long-term consistency.

Flexibility

Most “project”-focused approaches to development have a clear beginning and end. However, companies across industries have found that continuously modernizing their systems helps them stay efficient and realize more business value. Dedicated teams offer the flexibility to continue work on a product or new features as long as it benefits your company.

For example, even after deploying a new digital product, your stakeholders may realize that new features or updates could fulfill growing customer demands, boosting your company’s bottom line. Dedicated teams are ready to continue working on these improvements months or even years after what you initially thought of as the “deadline.”

Long-Term Consistency

Professionals on a dedicated team often work solely on your company’s digital products and systems. This encourages a deep understanding of your organization’s business objectives usually reserved for internal employees. At Programmers, we’ve heard time and again that our experts feel like reliable, insightful members of each client’s own staff.

Dedicated teams allow you to enjoy the long-term consistency of full-time staff members without having to worry about the costs and logistical headaches associated with hiring internally. That includes the issue of staffing shortages, which 57% of tech executives now cite as their top concern, according to CNBC. Your company can avoid these barriers to value with dedicated teams. Plus, you only need to pay for this service as long as it benefits your company.

Programmers’ Agile Experience

At Programmers, many of our dedicated teams help companies bring products from vision to implementation using our Agile Experience methodology. The Agile Experience is partially structured around the traditional scrum process, taking individual items from a product backlog all the way to deployment every two weeks. That way, your company can see value rapidly, and customers and employees can enjoy better experiences.

However, this methodology goes far beyond the average scrum process. Simply put, the Agile Experience provides the professionals, methods, training, and tools necessary to optimize product development.

To better understand how this boosts the traditional dedicated teams model, let’s look back at our two broad categories of pros: flexibility and long-term consistency.

Flexibility

Dedicated teams have the flexibility to respond more dynamically to your business needs. This is even more true with the Agile Experience, in which Programmers operates in two-week-long sprints to develop a new feature and prepare it for deployment. If the needs of your customers, employees, or product stakeholders change, our dedicated teams are prepared to pivot quickly and address these in our next two-week sprint.

Programmers’ Agile Experience also brings enormous flexibility with the tools we can use to facilitate each sprint. We understand that having the right systems for communication and organization during development is a major barrier to entry for some companies. That’s why we offer all of these tools and more as part of the Agile Experience. Meanwhile, for companies that already have communication and organization systems they prefer, Programmers dynamically adapts to your current infrastructure.

Finally, Programmers offers even more customization with the option of hybrid teams. The hybrid configuration allow you to form a team that includes Programmers’ professionals and your own employees. Companies opt for this formation when they want their staff to comprehensively understand the product or features Programmers builds for them.

Long-Term Consistency

With dedicated teams, your company can enjoy the talent and wisdom of IT specialists for years at a time. Programmers’ Agile Experience pays particularly close attention to adding team members with different specialties or “practice areas” that complement each other and your company’s core objectives. These practice areas can include DevOps, quality assurance, data analytics, and many others. This specialty-focused approach to team building ensures you gain uniquely beneficial insights in the months and years to come.

Another aspect of the Agile Experience focused on long-term goals is our biweekly coaching sessions. We use these as a chance to think beyond the product we’re currently building for your organization and look at other opportunities for your company to become more efficient and innovative with Agile processes. Over the months and years, these sessions will lead to a more dynamic and value-oriented approach to development across your company.

“Simply put, the Agile Experience provides the professionals, methods, training, and tools necessary to optimize product development.”

Leverage the Agile Experience Today

Dedicated teams ensure you have the talent you need when you need it most. With the Agile Experience as a framework, your company also benefits from personalized development coaching, specialized teams, and a full suite of Agile tools on day one. Contact us today to begin setting yourself apart from competitors, streamlining operations, and innovating in your field with the Agile Experience.