Building Experience With Outsourcing
April 17th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
I really hate having to write these types of letters.
Dear John Doe,
Per the terms of this project you agreed to have the assignment completed within a specific time frame. The project due date has now come to pass and you have yet demonstrated to me any significant progress. I request you contact me within the next 48 hours with a working demonstration or I will be forced to cancel the project from you and reassign it to another company. Please understand I am a fair person and if you ran into difficulties you should feel free to explain them to me.
Seriously, when I have to sit and write one of these letters I really feel like crap and it seems I have to write these letters every few weeks or so due to the number of people I outsource all my projects to.
My business does not yet require the full time employment of those that I outsource projects to, so outsourcing contracted help via the Internet is by far the most cost efficient solution for me. The trouble is out of the hundreds of specialists there are to choose from it is not always obvious who are the best candidates. In addition, I have gotten to the point where I am now contracting several new projects a week and the headaches just compound.
I thought I would write an example of how I outsource..
I decided several weeks ago that I needed to automate a method for pulling certain reports. Things were at the point where I had been pulling reports manually multiple times a day and it finally made sense to automate this task with a scheduler tied into a database. When I sat down to map out the pieces to make all this happen I knew I could build almost all of it but there was one area I needed assistance on. So I decided to pass the whole project off to a professional with a time frame of 1 week to complete. I figured I could build 50% of it in a week with no experience so I expect someone with a lot of experience to build the whole thing in about half the time.
Over the years I have gotten comfortable using ScriptLance.com and Elance.com but they’re many others out there. So I started this new project off by creating a quick 3 page whitepaper describing my needs exactly. I try to be as specific as possible with my needs and spend a bit of time jotting down all my ideas.
As I self mange my own servers and databases it is easy for me to tell the consultants what style I want everything written in and what kind of database to build out for.
Upon collecting all the information I feel is required for the consultant to complete their job; I post the project and set the length of accepted bid time. In this case, it’s such an easy project I figured I could get some decent bids within 3 days.
To make sure I know the consultants understand the project terms I ask them in the project description to write me a personal message at the time of bid summarizing what I had written in the 3 page document I provided. By doing this, it allows me to weed out those that just bid for the sake of bidding and those that actually took it seriously.
After 3 days pass I log back into the system and I begin the process of reviewing and narrowing down my potential consultants. I have 20 potential consultants to choose from, but I see right away 7 of the bids did not leave me personal messages.
Tsk tsk! Even though some of their bids were priced right and their ratings were high, they did not follow my instructions and to me that’s a sign of someone who might be difficult to work with. So I bump them off.
Now that I have a list of 13, I ran through and took a look their bids. If their pricing was way to low or way too high I bumped them off. I am all for cheap, but when people bid a few bucks for a system that should cost a few hundred then to me that’s another red flag. There goes another 3!
I now had 10 candidates to choose from and it took me only a few minutes to weed those others out. I now dive in deeper by reading the personal messages I had asked them to each send me.
My next task is to bump off the consultants who have really - really poor English skills. Outsourcing overseas is great because it offers you the ability to hire foreign programmers at a super cheap rate, but if they do not speak English how do you know they understood the specs of the project?
In this case I was able to bump off another 3 who I felt had problems communicating their summary. As for the 7 left, I read each summary very carefully making sure they knew what they were bidding. I then went in and checked out all their past projects. I was able to see a few who bid on this project did not have any feedback on the board showing they had experience doing this type of work. (Sometime you get people who have done nothing but graphics bidding out on scripting to expand their portfolio.)
After careful review, I decided to select the person who I felt was most qualified.
Plenty of times you are able to find the right consultant who will provide you with real excellent service. But as I started out this post, there are times when they just let you down and that can be disheartening.
A while ago I was working on a large project which I thought would take 60 days to build. The programmer and I spoke almost daily and as the 60 days got closer and closer I became nervous with the questions he was asking. But in my inexperience, I did not do anything about it and let 60 grow to 90 and then became 120. The problem here was I became attached a felt bad for the guy. I should have nipped it in the bud right away but it was an expensive lesson learned.
When outsourcing projects on the internet, my best advice is to remember you are outsourcing to get something done within a specific time frame. Set goals and let your consultants know you mean business. Today I make sure the consultants know what I require from them upfront.
Today I let my consultants know if they do not deliver within a timely fashion or fail to deliver any part of the project they will not get paid and I will certainly leave them a negative rating.
Outsourcing is not hard and you do not have to be a super manager to do it. You just need to make sure you take a few moments to clearly define what you want before expecting someone else to understand your needs.
