Do you need to accelerate your application development process and find inspiration? We have a solution

The situation in the IT job market today is not easy, there are not enough people. It is therefore important to think about how to make up for the lacking number of developers available. One option is to hire a dedicated team. With your own team you will gain the people you are missing, as well as new ideas and will increase the speed of your mobile application or software development process. Do you want to find out more?

Although, hiring a dedicated team from a development agency is a solution for your lack of production capacity, it is extremely important to manage how these extra human resources will be used. It is never as simple as body shopping.

An example is our collaboration with Jablotron, which uses our dedicated team to helpthem find new innovative approaches. The client sets the goal, which we have to reach, and then we try to come up with an (innovative) way to do it.

 

"With body shopping, a person or team earns their money by working physically at the client’s offices. It's about hiring people no matter what they do, everything is passed on to the client. We want our name to be connected with the results and work on the project more comprehensively. "

 

Vratislav Zima, CEO of SYNETECH

It is common to involve more team members when you want to dedicate your development capacities in order to accelerate the development process. However, a similar collaboration can be born from providing only one developer. This was the case at the beginning of our collaboration with the German company Tado. Over time, a dedicated SYNETECH team has put in roots there and provide

Innovation is key

There is no doubt that innovation is crucial for today's companies - especially for technological ones. But it's easier said than done. Unless a client has their own department dedicated to innovation, which is usually not the case, they are often overwhelmed by daily tasks and do not have time to think outside of the box. In the long run, it can be a journey into hell, or worse, into receivership.

Imagine a situation where a client decides that they urgently need to develop a mobile application or a website (or modify them). First, they look within the company and find out that their own developers have absolutely no capacity for something like this in the next six months. But this is too slow and too late given the growing competition. What now?

If you, as a client, are already in a situation, where you are desperately short of developmental capacities and have an outdated application or system that is costing you considerable financial resources every day (whether in terms of customer loss or inefficiency), then there is no question whether you need a dedicated team. The question is how soon can the team start and how good will it be?

 

"The ideal situation is to get to the level where we see how the processes work on the client's side and we can enter them with our ideas and possibly challenge them. The client will then tell us the outline of the solution he would like to get to, choose the technology and our collaboration may begin."

The advantage of a dedicated team is the "out-of-the-box" approach

The innovative nature and added value of such a solution lies in its "out-of-the-box" approach. As suppliers, we are therefore actually put in a situation, where we can use our own ideas to create a solution that has not yet been discovered in a given company. This could be because their internal team of people works the way it has always worked, or It may be the use of a new technology, approach or set of tools that have been overlooked as an option for the current given situation.

Two companies working on one project

The "cultural fit" of two companies working together is crucial for smooth cooperation for another reason - from our point of view, it is important that if there are two companies working on a project, even if they are partner companies, they need to be separate. In practice, our development team can easily work from the client’s office, but it is still part of our corporate culture. Of course, such cooperation can also work remotely, but it is the shared values that distinguish a dedicated external team from one that has been “body shopped”.

 

"We don't let our developers work in a dictorially driven company, where there will be people in the management team who treat their employees as mere resources, calculate their time to the second, only want to outsource development and once that is done, are no longer interested in meaningful collaboration. In such a scenario we would not be able to bring complex and different takes on the process and it could occur that our team would be punished for sharing ideas or opinions. In order for the collaboration to work ideally, the culture of the contracting company must be prepared for the supplier of the external team expressing their opinions freely and bringing their professional points of view."

At the same time, the cultural agreement of the companies eliminates the possibility that the client would try to steal the external developers due to the lack of competent experienced developers on the market. Leaving aside the contractual impossibility of this situation, a client on the same wave would not even think of such a tactic, or deprive himself of the innovative possibilities of collaboration. Fortunately, enlightened clients are well aware of this.

Hire a freelancer or an agency?

In these times, a dilemma may arise as to whether it is better to hire a freelancer or an agency to increase productive capacity. We have already talked about something similar in our article on mobile application development step by step. They both have their pros and cons.

What will cooperation with a freelancer bring you?

• Savings - A freelancer (or group of freelancers) is cheaper than hiring an agency.
• Substitutability is not guaranteed - If the team consists of freelancers, substitutions for developers cannot be guaranteed 100%.
• The need for leadership - A team of freelancers needs strong project leadership, otherwise collaboration can lead to chaos.

What will cooperation with an agency bring you?

• Project coverage - Although the product owner is still the main person in such a development, the development company can guarantee you increased production capacity and dedication better than any individual.
• Substitutability - When one of the development team drops out, for example due to illness, they are replaced by someone else from the company.
• Company know-how - As the agency is made up of many developers, it is highly likely that the sum of their knowledge will be much higher than that of an individual. Therefore, if a problem arises, it is easier to solve through a more experienced colleague, and such a model also adds much more to the important "out-of-the-box" thinking possibilities.

When choosing between freelancers and an agency, it also depends on the company's IT department

We recommend this type of cooperation to companies that already have their own IT department, but need increased productive capacity. Of course, this does not mean that we can’t develop a mobile application for a small company that does not have its own developers, but it is a slightly different type of collaboration. In order for the approach, based not only on production improvement, but also innovation to pay off for both parties, it should be a long-term cooperation based on trust and a desire to be inspired by the dedicated team of the developers.

 

 "This type of cooperation is good if the client is sufficiently advanced in terms of IT. Of course, it may happen that a startup wants to hire us, but it is not sufficiently organised itself. We prefer to find another form of cooperation with such a company, so that it is not just a big mess. "

 

Zbyněk Hraše, SYNETECH Head of Sales

To make cooperation a pleasure for all involved

However, what is even more important than the size of the company is that we agree with it on the values of holacracy now taking root in our country. The best results come from collaborative trust. The situation is bad when the approach on the part of the client is dictatorial, regardless of the skill level of the consulting developers. In this situation the innovative potential is inevitably killed, because their know-how and expertise cannot be used effectively. Alongside with the added value that could have been realised. Instead of accelerating the development of mobile applications or software and gaining knowledge through dedicated production capacity increases, it would be simple ‘body shopping,’ a way of cooperation that we are definitely not looking for.

Should you use a dedicated external team for application development or not?

An external dedicated team will allow you to accelerate the development of your mobile applications or software, bring you innovation and know-how as well as an "out-of-the-box" perspective. From the point of view of the lack of production capacity on the market, this is definitely an appropriate solution. But… (there is always a but) the values ​​and corporate culture of such a team should match yours, otherwise a different view of the matter could unnecessarily complicate cooperation. You should think from the beginning about longer-term cooperation, when it is possible to create mutual trust.

Would you like to accelerate the development of your mobile applications or software and lack the necessary development capacity? Write to us.