By BloggerKhan

My profession is Management and Marketing and it revolves around outsourcing, ecommerce and marketing on the internet. Wise men say identify what you are passionate about and then see if ...

The core reason for outsourcing is saving money. It is expensive to hire someone full time especially if the volume of work isn’t enough to justify a full time person. Or, you believe, if you outsource the work, you can get it done cheaper. That is the good part of outsourcing. But why do many outsourcing projects fail? The biggest reason in my opinion is poor communication. Sometimes that gap is linguistic in nature, sometimes neither party is willing to work in the other’s time zone, sometimes the business owner just does not realize he needs to do a better job at explaining his business process to the outsourcing company.

If you are so busy that you cannot spare time enough to explain your tasks to your outsourcing service provider or test his work or give him timely feedback, you should not outsource. It’s not going to work. Being an outsourcing company, we have all kinds of clients and we go through such time deficient clients all the time. A two weeks project may linger for months and more often than not such projects result in cancellations, bad feedback for both sides and overall a frustrating and wasteful exercise.

Another issue that comes up again and again is when the business owner thinks a one liner explains what he wants done. We see posts like ‘I want an ecommerce component added to my website’ and they solicit fixed priced bids. Now the experienced and smart providers won’t even bid on such projects as they know on the other end is an inexperienced business owner and this job will result in a disaster. Those that don’t know any better or are desperate for business bid. The business owner picks the lowest bidder and the project starts. The developer after a few weeks tells the owner the job is completed and he can check it out. When he checks it out he says “This is not what I wanted” and starts throwing a fit. He complains to everyone, refuses to pay and spoils the whole atmosphere. Everybody loses.

If you think you may also have a hard time explaining everything in detail, hire an outsourcing company on an hourly basis so they are not under pressure to get everything completed within a certain budget and you can explain things as you go and pay on actuals. Also make sure it’s a company you can talk to on the telephone. Helps a lot. We as an outsourcing company are the happiest on hourly jobs and it has been our experience that hourly projects result in the happiest clients. Once the project is completed, it’s also easy to transition hourly jobs into ongoing maintenance.

I hope that helped.