As an entrepreneur, you may be racking your brain trying to figure out how you can make your business flourish, launch new projects and reach new demographics. An extended development team is a great way to do that. Of course, hiring an extended development team can seem like a huge leap of faith and you’ll have a lot of questions. Here we’ll go over these questions and discuss beneficial factors an extended development team represents.
What exactly is an extended development team?
First and foremost, an extended development team differs to remote hiring or outsourcing in one major way- your working period with an extended team does not end upon project completion. An extended development team is an extension of your on-site team, so they continue working on whatever you’d like them to until the end of the agreed hire period. An extended development team ensures higher productivity and rewarding long-term partnerships.
There’s no sole definition for an extended team setup, as it’s customized according to the needs of each individual organization.
Some things that make this model unique are:
- An extended team is aimed at elevating the overall productivity of your in-house team, not necessarily replacing it. When the on-shore team works with the offshore team, irrespective of the project, there are opportunities to learn, and fill skill gaps.
- With an extended team, you keep complete control over your project. Unlike outsourcing to a remote team scenario, where the entire project may be handed to the external team. Constant and direct communication is kept between your in-house developers and off-site developers.
- Responsibilities are equally distributed among all team members who are equally invested in the process of building the product.
What makes extended teams better than outsourcing?
- Conversion of Temporary Projects into Long-Term Relationships
Generally, there are a lot of clients who outsource certain tasks or projects to companies and when the term of the project ends, it’s goodbye until the next project.
But, an extended team moves onto the next task you have and can take care of project maintenance if necessary. Any new projects can be handled by the extended team. The big benefit here is that development and communication becomes more efficient as you grow your relationship. Resulting in greater work quality and speed. Essentially, long-term relationships become more cost-effective over time.
- Prioritize Projects
When your organization used to outsource a project to an outsourcing firm, they will already have several ongoing projects in hand and therefore cannot fully focus on your project. With an extended team model, your task will always be prioritized and it becomes easier to organize schedules and coordinate tasks.
- Syncing Teams Together
When it comes to working together as teams, an extended team can be easily integrated into the organization to put its work and efforts in-sync with the in-house team.
- Continuous Goals
The goal of a traditional remote or outsourcing team is to make a product and successfully launch it into the market, and that’s it. But, an extended team shares the organizational goals set by their clients, an extended team is invested in an organization’s mission rather than just a single project. That’s why these teams find more job satisfaction and produce better work.
- More Transparency, Less Worry
When it comes to getting a tricky task done, managing multiple people assigned to do the same work can be confusing. When outsourcing, your project is prone to mistakes from miscommunication, affecting deadlines and the quality of the final result. With an extended team, you can easily assign, track and communicate with others, while causing minimal disruption.
- Adaptability
Since you have complete control of an extended team, you have more flexibility over task completion and task focus. However, if there’s a certain task that needs to be taken care of, it’s really easy to switch priority. If you’d like to start another project, you can simply increase the size of your extended team to meet new requirements.
Are Extended Teams Worth it?
Big players in IT have been handling all of this in a rather quirky way. For example, large IT companies like IBM, Oracle, and Samsung have built Research and Development offices across several countries with promising business opportunities like Ukraine. According to the Forbes reports, Ukraine has more than 90,000 developers, with senior developers earning about $3,000 USD per month on average.
Fundamentally, it is the target of every business owner to achieve maximum profit with minimal cost. The risks involved in building up an extended team can be huge if not properly thought through. Cost-effective extended teams are likely to be in another part of the world and you need to be prepared to negotiate different time zones.
Ukraine is growing in popularity, but the default place to look for cost-effective developer teams is India. They have the highest population of qualified individuals and have countless well-established development companies who are accustomed to entering long-term working relationships. If looking for an experienced development team, a popular and cost-effective development company is CodeClouds.
If you’re wondering about the first steps to building your own extended team, you’ll find this article on Development Team Building very useful!
