4 Cases for Building a Dedicated Software Development Team

Key Highlights

• Best fit when you need end-to-end delivery ownership.
• Ideal for new technology adoption (cloud modernization, data and AI initiatives, DevSecOps), when hiring won’t keep pace.
• Works well for multi-stream delivery where coordination, onboarding, and quality control become the bottleneck.

The Case for a Dedicated Development Team

Technology is evolving so fast that many industry leaders struggle to keep pace. In a 2025 PwC Pulse Survey, 40% of technology executives identified the “breakneck pace of technological innovation” as one of their top three barriers to achieving strategic goals, with 21% even calling it the number one obstacle.

Yet, carefully evaluating and leveraging these latest developments can boost your company's growth. This article explores the benefits and use cases for maximizing the value of building a dedicated software development team. Read on to discover success stories from our experience as a software engineering and technology consulting partner of choice to businesses from 20+ countries worldwide.

Who Should Consider a Dedicated Software Development Team? (And Why Now)

Building a dedicated software development team requires a process that sets up the foundation for a successful relationship in the long-term. We’ve covered the essential steps in one of our previous posts about how to build an external dedicated development team effectively.

This article takes a step back and answers the question: why would you need such a team in the first place? We asked experts from our Engineering and Customer Success teams to outline 4 of the most common use cases they’ve encountered in their experience.

The following cases are applicable for leaders managing one or more software development initiatives in their organizations, or those responsible for translating technology challenges to business stakeholders and vice.

Dedicated Software Development Teams vs Staff Augmentation

Use Case 1: You Need Technical Leadership, but Don’t Have a Technical Manager In-house

Making informed technological decisions is a fundamental capability within a software development team. You could be a visionary who knows their industry but lacks technology expertise, or simply someone who is deeply versed in product development and stakeholder management without necessarily being a hands-on technology expert. In those cases, a collaboration with a trusted, dedicated team can help you achieve your delivery goals, without having to deep dive into the software engineering aspects of the job.

With AI-assisted development becoming more common across teams, technical leadership is also key for setting the right guardrails, such as architecture decisions, security practices, and quality standards, so you get speed and reliability. Gartner says generative AI will require 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill through 2027, which makes strong technical leadership and delivery governance even more important.”

Empowering software development teams with the Product Trio

Tip: If you’re currently reassessing a partner or planning a transition, these resources might be useful:

• 7 tips for changing your software development agency
• 10 FAQs when meeting a custom software development agency

Use Case 2: You’re Expanding Into a New Tech Field (AI, Data, Cloud) Faster Tthan Hiring can Support

If you start working on something new or moving in a different direction, it is natural that your in-house team may lack skill or expertise in the field. If you don’t have the resources to educate your team or find new roles, building a dedicated development team will be more efficient and will pay back sooner.

Common Triggers

This use case often appears when you’re:

• Migrating or modernizing for cloud scale and resilience
• Building data foundations for reporting, automation, or AI features
• Introducing DevSecOps practices and stronger compliance controls
• Shipping a new digital product where time-to-market matters more than building every capability in-house

Example From our Experience

This is the case for one of our clients, an international railway engineering company providing end-to-end services from track construction to power, communications, and logistics. While expanding a responsive web solution for a European branch, they sought a partner with strong cloud and agile development expertise to support their digital transformation.

In this context, a dedicated team supported the modernization work by improving communication between internal systems and enabling real-time access to technical reports on track and inventory conditions.

Use Case 3: You’re Running Multiple Projects at Once, and Coordination Becomes a Bottleneck

The more projects you take on, the harder it is for your team to keep up with maintaining performance and productivity. Meanwhile, utilizing the budget efficiently, while meeting high-quality standards for software delivery stays a high priority. Even in cases where you manage to secure additional people from other internal teams, this hardly does the job. Questions like efficient onboarding, retention, and motivating people to collaborate as one team remain on the table.

This is one of the classic scenarios where it makes sense to engage a dedicated software development team. A well-oiled machine, with extensive technology expertise, can help you deliver multiple projects on time while optimizing costs.

What Are the Dedicated Teams Advantages Here?

A dedicated team helps when you need to:

• Adopt AI-enabled tooling safely (e.g., faster delivery while maintaining review and security practices)
• Run multiple workstreams in parallel without losing consistency
• Standardize onboarding, ways of working, and quality gates
• Keep delivery predictable through stable roles (engineering, QA, DevOps, BA, UI/UX)

Example From our Experience

A client in African media and digital entertainment operates platforms used by around 14 million people across 50 countries. This means that multiple initiatives are running in parallel to meet growing user expectations. To increase delivery capacity across roles, the engagement started with a single team and expanded over time to 30+ consultants, including business analysis and DevOps support. Before adding this capacity, the client found it challenging to move from ideas to execution quickly across concurrent projects.

What Changed

By helping them build a dedicated team, we provided consultants with domain experience and diverse technology skills and supported various projects with a focus on cloud infrastructure optimization. For example, one of their latest innovations is an AI model to optimize Azure resource consumption and redirect the budget to more effective marketing activities, thus saving the company thousands of dollars on cloud resources.

Learn more about Accedia's Software Development services

Use Case 4: Organizational Complexity (Procurement, Compliance, Silos) Slows Delivery

Let’s say you have technical leadership, innovation readiness, and efficient project management in place. Challenges could arise from organizational constraints, including operational silos, complex stakeholder management, and a bureaucratic procurement process.

These hold especially true with large organizations, where additional requirements often occur, such as local compliance regulations or evidence for the sustainability of services, making it harder to deliver technological innovation efficiently.

It pays off to convince senior leaders or procurement to build a dedicated software development team with an external partner and expand as needed with the same provider, rather than going through the same cumbersome process repeatedly to get additional internal experts.

Steps for Securing a Dedicated Software Development Team

• Get references of their work: Someone your decision-making team can trust, or a well-known industry name the IT services provider has worked for. You can also use AI search tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) to speed up due diligence, compile reference questions, summarize case studies, and cross-check claims against credible third-party sources.

• Put yourself in procurement‘s shoes: Understand their priorities, constraints, and decision-making process, and ask the software development company to prepare tailored documentation accordingly.

• Build a strong business case: Аrticulate the value that the specific team brings by highlighting their expertise, track record, and quantifying the potential benefits: cost savings, improved efficiency, faster delivery, or better quality. A customer success representative on the side of the external company can help with that.

• Leverage your influence as an IT leader within the organization: Seeking support from senior leaders based on your track record of successful deliveries and high performance is a compelling case for them to consider your proposal.

• Agree on work processes and Quality Assurance so that no one remains unpleasantly surprised. Define timelines, communication channels, regularity, quality assurance benchmarks, and project milestones.

• All of those will get you the buy-in needed to deliver practical software innovation that will lead your company‘s business growth and efficient operations.

From a software development vendor to a strategic partner (white paper)

Building a Dedicated Software Development Team? Final Verdict

All in all, the complexities of today’s technology demands necessitate the evaluation of working with a dedicated software development team. A well-coordinated one, possessing multiple roles and levels of expertise, can help you navigate organizational complexities, manage multiple projects, or expand into new tech fields. Following the outlined steps to build such a team, you opt for efficient operations.

To prepare your organization better for building a dedicated software development team, download our dedicated team model whitepaper.

Last Update: 8 January 2026