So, you’ve finally decided to have an offshore outsourcing partner. Now that you have a remote team to help fulfill some tasks for your company, we prepared a simple checklist to help ensure that your outsourcing experience will be a great one.
Define Your Objectives and Set Specific, Realistic Expectations
The first thing you need to remember is you’re dealing with another team outside your company. You want them to operate exactly as you wish. To do that, you need to set clearly defined goals and identifiable metrics. Your objectives should enumerate your reasons for hiring an outsourcing team and what exactly do you want them to accomplish. This allows you to track whether or not you’re making progress on your project. It also lets you foresee and take action on looming problems before they get out of hand.
Devise a Game Plan
This is where you create (or recreate) your business process. Now that you have an outsourcing team to act as an extension of your business, you need to plan your strategy well. This includes: a timeline of deliverables, training guidelines, and contingency measures. Your strategy should cover unexpected events like loss of key team members, technical setbacks, and additional operating costs.
Document Everything
Put everything in writing and make sure all relevant parties are able to secure a copy of it. Documentation minimizes operational ambiguity. If anyone in the team is unsure whether a task should be done within your organization, or perhaps it’s a job that should be handled by your outsourcing partner, you can always rely on your documentation to help resolve such confusion.
Trust us, taking time to produce well-written documents of all your work processes is well worth your time. It will definitely spare you from a lot of headaches in future.
Identify Frequency of Progress Reports
Part of successfully working with a remote team is the exchange of regular status updates of your project. Constant communication is important. If you want a daily, weekly, or monthly progress report from your offshore team, let them know about it. And enumerate clearly which metrics you want to track.
Once you have the details of the report, make an effort to analyze them in detail. These data will give you a better perspective of how things are going with your project, which areas need to be improved (if there’s any), and help you pay attention to issues that need to be resolved quickly.
Provide Appropriate Training and Resources
Depending on the size of project that you’ll choose to outsource, providing relevant training and resources usually make for an invaluable investment. If you want your offshore team to function exactly as you intended, give them guidance on how you want things done. Provide coaching and consultative advice as and when it’s necessary, teach them the processes you want them to follow, and provide insights to give them an idea how to work best with your team and achieve, or even exceed, the goals you’ve set for them.