Outsourcing Out Of The Country

In any business, there is a balance between maintaining the staff and resources for an aggressive market strategy and economy. So each hiring decision you make is important because each employee represents a cost to the company in terms of salary and benefits. In order to maintain predictability in your costs from year to year, you really cannot have the staff of any one department swell and shrink on a project by project basis.

But that is what can easily happen in an IT department when the company mandates a large and complicated IT based project. In order to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology, most businesses must undergo routine upgrades if not replacements to their technological infrastructure on a regular basis. So it is a challenge to keep the company on the cutting edge both in terms of internal systems but also the corporate web site and use of cyberspace. In order to keep up with the rapid advancements in how the internet can benefit the company and keep you competitive, you have to be able to turn projects around quickly and, as a company, be agile enough to undergo fairly radical change at the infrastructure level on a routine basis.

Outsourcing part of your project work offshore is one way to get control over those costs. Many times the IT staff resents the exporting of development work to outsourcing freelance workers or to an external vendor organization. That is why it is important for management to communicate that this step is not done as a vote of no confidence in the on staff personnel. Rather it is to focus the use of IT staff on duties that are crucial to the ongoing life of the business and to take short term project work offshore in order to keep staff workers focused on priority assignments.

The choice between using a local outsourcing organization and using freelance workers offshore is often one of economy but it also might reflect the approach these two contractor organizations bring to the table. Using a local agency for outsourcing work is preferable when you basically want to “turn over” a function to the contractor company. These kinds of outsourcing contracts tend to be turn key so the contractor is offering a total solution including development, project management, implementation, user training and ongoing support.

Project tasks that are good candidates for outsourcing to freelance workers are short term tasks that are part of a larger project being managed by internal personnel. The types of work that are often done successfully by offshore contractors include project documentation, development of user manuals or help files, data base programming, web site development and well defined programming tasks. Systems testing and debugging are also excellent tasks to give to outside developers.

The approach an offshore contractor will bring to the table are an eagerness to complete projects of limited scope. This is because freelancers live from project to project so the better defined the task is, the more successful a freelancer will be. This culture of limited scope project work success means that you will often get better turn around from an offshore contractor than you will from a local developer. They are eager for documented success so you will see quality work done quickly in anticipation of follow up assignments.

By knowing the talents and special skills of each “camp” of subject matter experts, you can make the determination whether the best worker group for any given project or project step should be on staff personnel, local contractors or offshore freelance workers. And by building good relationships with all of these niche workers, you can quickly mobilize the right worker for the right job each and every time.