Traditional Outsourcing VS Embedded Teams: Which one suits your company best?

How companies typically utilize outsourcing

The traditional way of dealing with outsourcing is pretty much straightforward today: Companies hire contractors, or “rent” developers for a specific amount of time and/or specific project. After the project is finished, their business relationship with those people also comes to an end.

There’s nothing wrong with it. And, most of the time, it’ll work just fine.

The problem with traditional outsourcing

What happens when needs are more diverse? A typical scenario would include a non-predictable flow of requests for support, new features, and bug fixing for existing projects, side by side with new projects waiting to be implemented. This could really put significant strain on existing staff and create serious capacity problems, impacting the company’s reliability.

What companies have come to recognize is that they will often need more than a couple of hired hands - they need people that are familiar with their work culture, their tools, their processes, their people, and their clients, and can handle anything that comes their way.

The obvious solution to the problem would be new hires. But a new hire would not always be useful in cases like the above, especially when the amount of work needed to be done varies greatly from month to month. Also, different tasks and projects may require different skills, so maybe a single person wouldn’t be enough. 

On the other hand, it’s not possible to just “rent” a team of developers and have them on standby.

Or is it?

How embedded teams redefine outsourcing

There’s a not-so-new, but still different, approach: Embedded teams. Stress on teams, not individuals, since a single embedded person can hardly bring the benefits that a team can  provide.

Views on how embedded teams work (or should work) vary, so I’ll try to lay out our own definition, as we implement it at DotSee, here:

In a nutshell, an embedded team is a stable group of people known by their first names, ready to work for a company any time something new comes up. But it’s much more than that - in the sense that it’s roughly the same people all the time, functioning as an entity ready to interact and blend with the company’s existing staff without having to start from scratch every time.

Embedded teams’ members get familiar with the client’s existing staff and processes and are able to get seamlessly integrated into their workflow and identify and work on tasks in a very fast and effective way, having the added ability to have the most suitable person assigned to each task.

However, the main advantage of embedded teams is that they are available on demand, and they can “scale out” when there are peaks, much like a “developer cloud” service, only difference being that each member of the team is not just an anonymous resource but rather a well known individual with specific skills and abilities.

Finally, from a financial viewpoint, embedded teams are usually much more cost effective compared to a single contractor or hired developer since they’re compensated only for the time they actually spend working with a specific company. This may vary depending on the agreement made, but it’s generally around this principle.

At DotSee, we implement the “embedded team” approach with every support and/or development agreement we make with agencies and organizations for years now. We feature a small, very flexible team that can adapt to different internal processes and ways of working.

As an addition to the standard benefits of embedded teams, our own team is very opinionated without being intrusive, meaning that every member of the team understands complexities, challenges, and possible pitfalls for every single task or project and is able to offer consulting and advice where needed, whether this regards a technical issue or even general organizational matters. 

Do you need such a team for your company? Let's talk.

We work with agencies as well as Umbraco site owners worldwide and provide our team's services in the form of retained development hours and/or support & maintenance contracts with SLA.  If you are interested to know more, get in touch.