OutsourceSurvival.com

This article is for those who don’t have a technical bone in their body, and feel intimidated by the prospect of hiring some guy in India (or wherever)to do it for them. Aside from convincing you that ordering a website IS like ordering a hamburger, this article will give an outline on what you need to know to build your own website.

There is a common misconception that if you don’t know how to muck around with code, you don’t know enough to outsource the building of a website. Let’s just burst that bubble right now- it’s easy. Anyone can do it. Yep anyone, even if you’re still not sure what a blog is, and you think .NET is just a web address

A Website is like a Burger

mmm weburgerlicious...

Ok, here comes my food analogy… it’s late and I haven’t eaten dinner. Bear with me it should eventually make sense. The premise is that you don’t need to know how your favourite hamburger is made to order it or enjoy it. Likewise, you don’t need to know what’s in the guts of a website to have a freelancer build it. In fact, just like with food sometimes it’s nicer not to know. Blissful ignorance can be a powerful thing

However, just like buying a hamburger, it’s up to you to decide what fillings, buns, and sauce you want. Those decisions are your responsibility. There’s nothing worse then waiting for someone to order when they haven’t worked out what they want. They fumble around, change their mind, and keep everyone waiting. Often they’ll ask their friend or the person serving them ‘what should I get?’ Desperately seeking to dodge that tremendous commitment and get someone else to make the decision… then in the heat of the moment, they order something they didn’t really want. Don’t let this be you when it comes time to build your site. Read the rest of this entry

This article aims to save you time and improve your project success by discussing how to systematically select the best freelancer bids. It is part of a series of articles “How to Find a Great Freelancer Online”.

On any given project, you’re likely to receive somewhere between 10 and 50 bids if you post it to one of the larger recommended sites. As a general rule, the larger the project the more interest you’ll get. Bigger projects are far more lucrative, and occur less often in the marketplace, so freelancers tend to queue far and wide to try and win it.

Don’t bother talking to everyone…

If you don’t have a system for managing this deluge, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of bids you receive. Reading them is hard enough… responding to them all… no way! Read the rest of this entry

There are literally hundreds of websites now where you can hire individual freelancers or contract to full service outsourcing companies. Your choice could make or break your project. So how do you find a good one?

This article is part of the series “How to Find a Great Freelancer Online”.

In this article we will discuss the best websites to find a high quality freelance or outsource service providers. These are the sites that I’ve used, or had personally recommended to me by other entrepreneurs. I consider these to be the market leaders for services, and I really don’t think there’s much need to look further. Just like I don’t really need more then 1 or 2 eBays… the same idea applies.

Without further ado, here are my top 4, in order of preference:

• www.rentacoder.com
• www.guru.com
• www.elance.com
• www.odesk.com

If you think I’ve missed an important one let me know and I’ll add it!

Want to blaze your own trail?

Suppose you don’t like the above four, what should you look for generally? These are the features you want as a minimum: Read the rest of this entry

By far the best way to manage change, is to not have any… but we all know that even with the best planning and the simplest task there are bound to be a few holes. 

Sometimes it may not even be you that causes the change- it could be your freelancer. So we need a way to keep it organised, and reduce the risk that the project will spin out of control.

In this article I’ve included a few examples of how things can break, and at the bottom is my current system for managing change in *any* small or medium project.

Read the rest of this entry

This is a brief discussion on controlling change within a live outsourcing project; in particular, ‘reducing scope’, or removing or simplifying functionality. This was a topic I was completely unfamiliar with when I first got into using freelancers. Over the course of a 12 month project, small uncontrolled compromises compounded each other, and in the end ‘broke’ many of the business objectives. Expensive rework, flawed functionality and a system that didn’t work as expected were the price I paid for inexperience.

On a smaller project, a few corners cut here and there may seem like no big deal, and sometimes they aren’t. On larger projects (starting at several $K), or projects that extend over longer periods of time (weeks/months) small reductions in functionality or simplifications of requirements can really start to have a negative impact on your finished product.

Why would you want to cut corners?
You’ve done your plan, you’ve worked out what you need, you’ve found a freelancer who has agreed to do the work. The obvious question is why would you want to cut anything out? Well from my experience, once a project (software in particular) gets underway a couple of things happen that will force your hand.

Your outsourcer for the first time actually takes a good look at your requirements. If you’re not careful, up until this point they’ll have been giving your requirements lip service. It seems totally crazy to agree to a project that isn’t understood… but that’s the way many do it. They’ll have been focussed on the sales effort, and will have committed only very limited resources to actually understanding your requirements. Now all of a sudden they’re responsible for building it and payday is guaranteed… all they need to ensure is that they can turn a profit on it. Read the rest of this entry

This series of articles will help you achieve a much higher success rate on your projects by discussing how you can determine a good outsourcer/freelancer from a bad one. While it’s not 100% perfect, using my approach will dramatically improve your chances. I’ve used this approach on dozens of projects, and found that it has a excellent success rate.

When hiring a freelancer, we’re looking for someone who is adequately skilled, can communicate effectively, and who is going to take an interest in your work. It can be frustratingly difficult to find all of these qualities.

It’s also pretty common knowledge amongst freelancer’s that this is what most entrepreneurs are looking for. So it’s not surprising that on any given project, many of the bids received are designed to convince you that the bidder has all of these qualities… some bidders even go to the extreme of not addressing your project criteria at all; and instead focus on the touchy-feely ‘look how friendly I am’ stuff.

If you’re new to outsourcing, it’s normal to be drawn to the happy-friendly-feel good bidder. They make you feel comfortable and they always seen nice. I made this mistake early on, believing that many of these bidders must be so experienced, so smart, so great, that they need not concern themselves with the details of my project. I’ve had some major disasters (projects breaking down once the details are worked out) as a result, and I implore you to ignore feel good bidders and focus on my criteria below. Getting someone you can work with is important, but it’s essential that you don’t get drawn into the empty sales pitch!

So how do you pick a good freelancer? Read the rest of this entry

This article discusses what I consider to be the most important rule for entrepreneurs and small business to successfully use outsourcers or freelance labour. It is part of a series of articles I will publish over the next few weeks outline what I think the key guidelines are for outsourcing success.

My first rule of outsourcing is never, ever, ever, ever, outsource a problem! It’s the number one rule because it’s by far the easiest and most dangerous one to break. Early on I broke this rule repeatedly, without even realising what I was doing wrong. I kept thinking that I just couldn’t find good people, or that foreign providers just weren’t skilled enough. But the problem wasn’t (always) a lack of their skill; it was often my application of that skill. My expectations were in some ways too high and I was asking them to perform above/beyond their capability. I’ll explain what I mean.

Traps for new punters…

The first few times you engage someone to do specialist work for you, it’s easy to fall into the trap of giving them too much responsibility. It feels nice to ‘hand over the reigns’, and we’re conditioned to doing this. For example, if you take your car to a mechanic and you tell them that it needs a service; you’re trusting the expert to take care of the details. Here you’ve just outsourced a problem, that is, your car is worn and needs maintenance. You don’t know what maintenance and you don’t care! It’s up to the mechanic and you trust him to work out the details.

This mentality will lead you to disaster if applied to a foreign provider. In the mechanic example, if you were to outsource this properly you would need to say “change the oil, change the plugs, change the air filter, check the break pads for wear and tell me how worn they are…” etc. You are actively limiting the freelancer’s discretion, which forces you to consider your problem and work out a solution. Read the rest of this entry