As someone who is offering offshore outsourcing services the question of “whether the dedicated developer or the fixed project model is better” is something which I am thinking about a lot these days.
So what is better?
In this blog post I am going to write in favour of the dedicated developer/ dedicated team model. There are several reasons why I think the dedicated developer model is much more efficient for the sake of near- or offshoring.
Pricing
In a fixed priced project a client would not know how much of development effort was actually taken to develop the software concerned. He will be relying on the estimate made by the software outsourcing company. It will be incredibly difficult to know how much development effort went into the project. This might be ok if a client has deep pockets but for companies who look at offshoring to reduce costs it might be interesting to exactly know what they are paying for.
Transparency
In a dedicated developer model the client would exactly know what the developer or the developers are doing at any point of time. They could call up the project manager of the outsourcing company or ask the developer directly what has been done or what is being done. The client could ask for hourly reports which should be sent from the dedicated developer.
Work culture acclimatization
In a fixed price project model the customer would be sending a project into a black box (in this case the near- or offshore outsourcing company) and would wait for a positive outcome. The client would not have any influence during the project, although he could ask for updates on the project progression.
In a dedicated team model the client could impose his own work culture on the dedicated developer (this is of course also achieved by the client by being included in the selection process of the developer at the beginning of the dedicated offshoring engagement). The dedicated developer would of course take one or two month to acclimatize to the new work culture but after that he would be adjusted to the work culture of the onshore team.
Close colaboration on quality of output
In the dedicated offshoring model the client could be assigning an onshore project manager who would be overlooking the code of the dedicated developer at the end of each day. The testing could be done either at the clients side or the offshore outsourcers side. The working code could be presented at the end of each week to the onshore project manager by the dedicated developer as well as to the onshore team if needed.
The dedicated developer would be getting to know the quality standards of the onshore team as he will be closly working together with them for the whole day (at least for the 3 or 4 hours in which there is daytime in each country concerned).
Personal contact with the developer
Personal relations are always important. It does not matter in which kind of business relationship. But having a personal contact with the dedicated developer will help the client to understand the needs of the developer better. In turn the developer will be really getting to know the products, culture and people of the clients company he is working with.
As you can see from the above points it could be argued that the dedicated developer model is the one to go with.
What is your opinion on this?
YUHIRO is a German-Indian software company which provides dedicated software developers to companies in Europe. It also has project teams which work on fixed priced projects. If you want to know more on the different options for software development please feel free to contact us at info@yuhiro.de or call us through our service number.
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