Outsourcing Advice – Guide to Efficient Outsourcing

This is a guest post by Mohsin Khawaja, he has written a short e-book about Best Practices for Outsourcing that contains useful tips based on his own experiences.

Outsourcing business projects job is not a liberty that is enjoyed only by corporate houses these days, in fact various different types of works are being outsourced even to individuals who are capable of performing them from remote locations around the world.

You could just about outsource any kind of works which does not require their physical presence.

Most in the works that are outsourced to virtual assistants or remote workers are the ones that consume a lot of time. However, you will need to make sure that you select the right people for getting the jobs done.

Firstly, you will need to clearly chart out what exactly will require from them (the resource) before you sign them up. It would be always a wise choice to document your training process with step by step instructions in order to ensure that the quality of work is never compromised. The documented training materials will come handy if you have to hire more remote employees, or if you have to replace the existing ones.

When you outsource your business projects, there are the main critical factors that you will need to take care of. They are:

• People management
• Process management
• Time management

People Management

Whenever you outsource your business projects to virtual assistants, it is important that you manage them in a very professional manner. It would not make any business sense if they were to leave you after you take all the pains for training them on the project.

Therefore, it is very important that you document all the terms and conditions, and get a complete consensus from your remote assistant before getting started with the project.

The common motivational factor among all the virtual assistants is that they are looking for monetary benefits for the services they render. Therefore, it is very important for you to maintain a robust and timely payment procedure in order to retain them in the long run.

Process Management

An ideal process or project is the one that pretty much on runs on its own, and the one that is not dependent on any individual in particular. Streamlining the process to such an extent can be difficult for small online businesses, especially if they do not have an experienced professional who manages business operations. The goal of any business is to ensure that a process is not interrupted at any point of time.

Therefore, you’ll need to prepare a plan or a process map that includes the entire running of the project, along with well documented plan for hiring the necessary human resources whenever needed. It also includes an ongoing process improvement plan to streamline it further.

Time management

The success of any business project will be dependent on timely deliverables. When you hire the services of virtual assistants, time management can become a tricky affair as you cannot monitor them personally.

However, you cannot give the same reasons to your clients for delayed project submissions. Therefore, it is very important that you have are stringent recruiting process in order to find the right professionals to handle your business projects.