MANAGING OUTSOURCED PROJECTS

As a small or medium sized business owner wanting to expand your business you have a dilemma, do you get the extra work and then employ extra people to handle the work, or do you employ the people first? Either way will put your business under pressure, you either don’t have enough people to do the work, or you have too many people and, potentially, no work for them to do.

Avoid Risk

It’s painfully obvious that growth is important to all businesses in order for them to be deemed successful. However employing other people can be very difficult, complex and expensive option. You may like to consider using outsourcing as a method of growing your business.

Outsourcing basically means that you choose certain activities that your business currently handles and then delegates these to external firms, usually for a predetermined fee.

However, there are some tips to bear in mind when you are choosing a company or individual to whom you are considering giving your business:

First, you should be sure that your outsourcing partner will not try to engage directly with your clients. As this company will be often dealing directly with your hard-won customers, you have to trust them. A contract should be drawn up to ensure that this company does not attempt this.

You also need to make sure that the person you are hiring has the appropriate skill set which is required to complete the work to the necessary standard and in good time. Your customers won’t want to hear excuses about how your failure was actually someone else’s fault and are just likely to walk away and not use your company again.

Once you have chosen your outsource firm you should then make sure you ser up a robust Service Level Agreement with them (SLA). The Service Level Agreement should explain what you expect from the service that they provide, including the time frames when completing the project.

When you are hiring an outsourcing company it is also acutely important that you have a thorough process that is designed to monitor the outsourcing of the product. You need to know any and all of the details about your chosen outsourcing company, the time line that you need them to work to, and any special requirements or information that pertains to the project that you will need to pass on to ensure that the eventual product is to your, and subsequently, your client’s, entire satisfaction.

You also need to add other things to this list, but each project will be unique and you should consider your information flow very carefully before engaging an outsourcing company.

Offshore Outsourcing

One popular type of outsourcing is to outsource products abroad to developing countries like China, India and the Philippines. These types of outsourcing projects are designed to reduce direct costs and overheads and, in turn, increase profits. For example, in the UK, US and Australia, many customer consumer support lines have been moved to India to reduce these aforementioned overheads, and much manufacturing of staple, and indeed specialist, goods have been moved to China.

In Conclusion

Outsourcing projects to other firms could be a great way to reduce your businesses overheads while still getting the work done. It’s also a very good way of growing your business without exposing your business to unnecessary financial risk. Owners of small businesses often have to multitask and juggle a number of projects which are all on the go at the same time but, by outsourcing, it is possible to reduce the workload without substantially increasing overheads.

Picaso Consulting can support you in this process either by managing your offshore partner or in helping you select that partner.