Outsourcing: professionals’ opinion

In the second post of this series I said that clear communications was the single, most important factor when outsourcing, whether locally or globally.

I said this based on conversations with my management, since NTR does remote development for both large companies and startups.

I asked my friend Miki what she thought and she agreed. But, since we are both hyper-focused on communications, she suggested posting the question to Silo, a startup tech forum. Here is the question she asked.

What is the single, most important point when outsourcing local or global?

Anything can be outsourced, not just sftwr dev. Biz outsource recruiting, benefits/payroll, design, marketing, sales, etc. Personally, we outsource shopping, cleaning, child-rearing, etc.

For an outsourcing series at http://blog.ntrlab.com/ tell me in one sentence the single, most important advice you can offer when outsourcing.

Outsourcing-Bus-2012

image credit: here

The first response was from Silo founder Moshik Raccah, “To me, the most important aspects for successful outsourcing are setting expectations and communication. It’s also the hardest to get right.”

Sagit Weiss, Founder and CEO at Crowdacure, was quick to chime in. “Agree. Clear expectations and communication”

Computational Biologist Doron Lemze added an astute warning to which few pay enough attention, “When you outsource think if you can live with less control on the element that you outsource.”

Irene Lefton, with a career fostering global services and customer success added more detail, “Align objectives with your contract terms – both parties need to benefit and it needs to be clear what the team will do and what outcomes are expected.”

Israel Rand, VP Business Development & Sales at Labgoo, elaborates the value and yield of good communications, “I think that communication is the most important piece in outsourcing! If both, the user and the outsourcer have an open good communication channel, then there aren’t any surprises. The rest will follow (expectation, pricing, changes etc.)”

And Oleksandr (Alex) Andriyanov, CEO of American Programming Company adds, “From my humble prospective Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies should keep in mind Business Value for the Customer. This way everything else is coming in place.”

Finally, Gal Nirel, an online and offline entrepreneur, expanded on what’s involved and, sadly, the cost of not doing it, “I outsource to achieve a business goal, the benefits can be reducing the time to customer/market, cost or other company’s resources. Since outsourcing has its risks the most important element in my view would be to mitigate it by setting clear objectives, KPI’s and the resources to manage it and stop/modify it if necessary. If you can’t manage it well, you can’t outsource it well.

Writing it with pain for my friend who just closed his business this week burned his entire seed round on a bad, poorly managed outsourced product project…”

There you have it. My totally unscientific sampling confirms without a doubt that clear, well thought-out communications are the key to successfully outsourcing a project, whether large or small.

No real surprise, since good communications is the secret sauce in every successful venture, from marriage to management to parenting and anything else you can think of.

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