When you begin to create your own products you may find it useful to outtask certain tasks. Before we continue though let me make the distinction between outsourcing and outtasking. Outsourcing is a process related function and differs from outtasking which is a project related function. For instance, you may outtask the development of a home-study course or a piece of software but you may outsource support for those products or call center operations.

Outtasking can have many benefits. Outtasking can also be costly and result in unfinished or poorly developed products that are of little commercial value.

I learned the hard way about outtasking. One of the first outtask projects I had developed for me was a piece of ecommerce software that I considered a landing page system. At the time I was unaware of 1ShoppingCart. If I had been, I would have written the project specs for a clone of 1ShoppingCart.

Anyhow, the first developers I chose to work on the project quoted me a price of $800. It’s been a while now but I think I paid half up front and the rest on completion. They said they could have the project done in two weeks.  Months later my Eastern European developers delivered something completely amateurish and unsuitable for commercial use. They basically took bits and pieces of other applications and haphazardly married them together into one poorly performing app.

I admit, I didn’t give the first developers the clearest instructions for what I wanted. This is a warning to you. Aside from choosing qualified outtask partner, you must have a very specific plan. Take the time to plan out everything in as much detail as possible. This will save you time and money.

Make sure the outtask partner understands your native tongue very well. I would even say setup a phone interview with them and probe them about what their role is etc… For instance, the person who you are speaking to could just be an account rep whose only task is to deal with you. That is fine if they have a tightly managed team and very good skills in communication and translation and can convey your messages very specifically to the team.

On my second go around with this project which cost me several more months and around $1400 I encountered the above situation. Yes, my contact spoke English but she had limited technical knowledge and was mainly more of a sales person. The developers who were actually doing the work were in various parts of the world including India, Pakistan, Iran, and Brazil. She would pass information along to them and I would receive queries in return that were in such poor English I had to guess their meaning.

My landing page project is on the third go around now and things are going smoother.  I have outsourced other projects since and have learned many things that I will share here:

1. Make sure that you have very clear specific details written up about your project, including a timeline and deliverables. Set your payment terms to pay the project in stages upon completion of milestones.
2. Always interview prospective candidates. Several times if necessary. No exceptions. If you don’t know the right questions to ask pay someone else a few dollars to write you a questionnaire of what to ask potential outtaskers.
3. Ask for the telephone numbers and email addresses of three (or more) references.  If you only have email addresses, email the references and ask if you can call and speak with them.
4. Don’t be afraid to abandon the project if the outtasker isn’t living up to their end of the deal. Don’t throw good money after bad, because the truth is that if you are having communications problems early-on they probably will get worse.
5. On places like Elance, GetACoder, RentACoder, and Guru don’t judge candidates solely by their feedback numbers. Make sure the feedback is for relevant projects.  For instance, if you are developing a complex peice of software you don’t want it being done by a graphic designer who is a part time programmer.
6. If an outtasker provides you with samples of their work make sure that they also provide email addresses of people who can verify the persons work.
7. Do an internet search for the outtasker’s username, company, instant message name, or email address and look for any negative comments.
8. Choose an established business over an individual if at all possible. Accidents happen, if you hire a lone outtasker you have the potential to be out much time and money if they happen to die of a heart attack, car accident, or other misfortune.
9. Take your time when choosing. Ensure that the outtasker has actually read your job posting. Make it very explicit and hide a word or phrase down towards the bottom paragraph that they must reference in order to be considered. Think about it. A lot of these guys don’t even read the postings. Many just apply to everything they see figuring if they throw enough spaghetti at the wall eventually something is going to stick. Many of these people are very poor. Often times they are working from internet cafes and really have nothing to lose by overstating their skills.
10. If you are having programming done make sure the programmers or developers comment the code. This will be a huge benefit for anyone else who has to work on the code.
11. Bonus Tip: If you have the resources you may consider having multiple teams work on the same project independently. This is a good way to become more experienced in choosing outtask partners. You will learn what you like and dislike about the various teams.  This sounds very costly but based on my experience it is still possible to have software created at considerably less cost by three teams elswhere than to have it created by one team here in the states.

We could really keep going on this topic but you get the idea. Do your homework, have a solid plan, and your chances of hiring successfull outtaskers will increase.

Tweet This Post