Hi Betty,
Always a Pleasure to help friends when able .I know what your saying my friend ,if your going to outsource I have listed below some helpful information I hope you find it useful . I would love to hear how your ,if you decide to do so outsourcing is going. Have a great weekend Gods speed :-) Lee
Considerations for Deciding to Outsource.
The following are some of the key considerations when making outsourcing-related decisions:
- Do our in-house resources have the needed capabilities? First the organisation must identify whether or not its employees have the specialties and technical skills necessary to manage and build the desired product or service offering. (If you don't, of course outsourcing looks like the obvious choice. If you do have the right capabilities, some of the following questions will take on increased importance in deciding whether outsourcing is really the right call after all.)
- Should in-house capable people be used for this next effort? Assuming the desired skills do exist on staff, the organisation must determine if pulling them from their current duties is worth the risk to previously defined roles and committed projects. Where does the new project fall in the priority scheme, and how critical is it to the company's business goals? High enough to consider pulling people from other endeavours to keep the work close?
- Is this work something the company should even consider outsourcing? Generally, outsourcing should not be considered for projects that require significant domain knowledge, i.e. knowledge related to industry specific technology, business processes, or organisational culture that would be either difficult or inadvisable to transfer to another company. If the domain knowledge is specifically a key part of the company's or particular product's competitive advantage and differentiation, then the company may not want to transfer that unique knowledge to another organisation. The ability to sign intellectual property protection agreements does not necessarily mean it's a good idea to let an outside organisation do such sensitive work. In addition, the level of understanding necessary for adequate comprehension and outsourcing success may be too deep to make it worthwhile financially.
- If you outsource the work, what management oversight will it require, and by whom, and will you even come out ahead in terms of true additional resource hours? In my experience, the employees who have the know-how to properly manage an outsourced project are usually the ones already involved in other core activities. While it may initially look like an easy decision to outsource and thereby gain additional resources with no load on your busy internal experts, be sure to look at the strain the new effort will put on existing responsibilities. Will your critical experts have to spend so much time managing the outside resources, writing specs, reviewing their work, attending team meetings, that you haven't gained nearly as much resource for your extra Dollars as you thought? You could even lose two-fold in that not only are your internal resources losing hours to outsourcing oversight; they're also compromising their own project work due to increased task-switching and reduced concentration. The additional oversight demands often add unplanned costs to the project, while also taking the resource away from previously assigned duties and organisational objectives.
- What is the true cost of the implementation plus management work, including internal review and oversight work? Obviously the cost of contracting the effort versus managing the project in-house should be considered. When looking at the costs of the fully outsourced project, look beyond the total cost on the proposal and make sure internal costs are not being forgotten. In a perfect world, when a project is outsourced, we'd be able to sign the proposal for the defined requirements and walk away until the point of testing and internal sign-off. Unfortunately, all too often this isn't the case. The business needs and internal pains the project is trying to solve may have been communicated and the desired outcome visually depicted; however, many outsourcing outfits view themselves as implementers with a heavy reliance on the outsourcing organisation for oversight and general project management and may not have bid all the work really necessary to perform their own reviews and internal management, up to the oversight and quality requirements your company expects.
- What can we depend upon our vendor to take full responsibility for and true ownership of? This is where things get interesting as outsourcing arrangements are considered and bid. We all know how the sales cycle works. We identify a few possible suitors, communicate our high level business needs, and then the vendor's sales force tells us how they plan to exceed our expectations, delivering the world on a silver platter. In the best case we want the selected vendor to be fully versed in what is being outsourced, and expect them to serve as a trusted advisor and advocate to our organisation and take responsibility for quality and completeness. In many cases our chosen vendor possesses this good intention and the expertise to deliver. However, good intentions by themselves don't make the grade. The company must be prepared to apply business management, intuition, and analytical skills to select the right vendor, ensuing the right expertise is available on both sides of the project and that the necessary project oversight will happen. For example, although it is almost contradictory to one of the key reasons for these agreements, in most cases, the contracting company will need to provide a resource fully versed in the service or technology being outsourced.
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