Yes. If a Coder Trove team has been embedded in your programme for a while and you want to own that team outright, you can. The people, the knowledge and the codebase move to you on terms agreed at the start of the engagement. We call the option Assemble, Operate, Transition. No client has taken it up yet. The clients who ask about it tell us the same thing: they want to know the door is there if they grow faster than planned.
Most of the time, the transition option is not in play. Our delivery centre in Ho Chi Minh City delivers Coder Trove client work: Dynamics 365 programmes, custom software, cloud engineering and, more recently, Essential Eight uplift. The engineers are our staff, managed to the same standards as our Australian consultants, and the client has one person at Coder Trove accountable for the outcome. That is the arrangement for the large majority of our clients, and it does not change unless they want it to.
For a long-running programme, we can set the team up so that it can be handed over later.
Assemble. We recruit for your programme instead of allocating whoever is free. Candidates are interviewed against your stack, your domain and your ways of working, through the same hiring process we use for our own consultants. This takes longer than pulling people from a pool, and it only makes sense for work that will run for a year or more.
Operate. The team works inside your tools and ceremonies day to day, and inside our management, engineering standards and security controls. Performance, quality and continuity are our responsibility. You deal with one accountable person at Coder Trove.
Transition. If you decide you want to own the team, we transfer it. The transfer terms (notice period, who moves, how knowledge and code hand over) are written into the engagement contract at the start, so there is nothing to negotiate under pressure later.
It suits organisations that expect to keep building for years, that may want their own engineering capability eventually, and that prefer to grow a team they already know over hiring a new one cold. It does not suit short projects, and it is not for a client who wants a team without the job of running one. If that is you, the standard arrangement, where we run the team for as long as you need it, is the better fit.
Because the option is designed in from the start, the handover is mostly administrative. Documentation, runbooks and shared knowledge are kept current throughout the engagement, so there is no scramble to write things down at the end. The people move to your employment, either through an entity of yours in Vietnam or through an employer of record you choose, and we help you work through those options. The code and infrastructure are already yours. We stay available afterwards for the specialist support most clients still want.
A lot of distrust of offshore delivery comes from arrangements where the client's dependence is the provider's business plan. Writing the exit into the contract changes that. We run the team as if it might be handed over next quarter, and the client invests in the relationship knowing it is not locked in. In our experience the option improves the engagement whether or not it is ever used.
No. We have offered it to clients on long-running programmes and they tell us they value it, but every team we have assembled is still operated by us.
No. Most clients keep the standard arrangement, where Coder Trove runs the team for as long as the work lasts.
Usually, yes. The terms are agreed per engagement, and a partial transfer is a sensible way to start.
In Vietnam, through your own entity there or an employer of record. We help you work through the options before anything is signed.
There is no separate fee for having the option. Transfer terms are agreed in the engagement contract, and we quote them when we scope the programme.
If you are weighing up how to resource a long-running programme, our partner augmentation and custom software pages describe the engagement models, and this post covers what makes an embedded team work past the first quarter.
Marcel Rizzolo is Director of Coder Trove.