Outsourcing your work can have many benefits. It obviously comes at much lower costs than in-house services. Besides, being done by professionals you get a much superior solution than in-house team if you can’t afford to hire those experts.
How do you go about outsourcing your work to the services providers? The best place to start is online. There are several portals that provide online space for service providers to advertise their services and for companies to post their tasks. Typically, once the task is posted many coders would bid for the project. Some sites also offer you to invite special coders to bid on the project and some others allow you to post private tasks for particular coder with whom you had a pleasant experience in the past. While posting your tasks, try to be as comprehensive about the job as possible. It helps the bidders bid properly and it also helps you evaluate the bids better.
Once you get a bunch of bids, you have to start judging their compatibility with your requirements and constraints, if any. Some of the important things that you must consider are the costs, the past coder record and the time duration for completion of the task. Though you would prefer lower costs, this could be because the coder doesn’t have good ratings or is taking a lot longer to complete the job. If either or both are not acceptable to you, you must look at higher bids. Some sites also allow bidders to deposit guarantee money, something that you can claim if the work is not up to the mark. Other issues that you may want to consider are the location of the coder. People living in developing nations may have different work cultures, ethics and times of working. You must be aware of those and ensure that they don’t cause hurdles in your task execution.
After you pick a bid, in most web sites you are requested to escrow the funds with the site or sometimes you may have to make part payment to the coder. Then comes the most important part, make sure that you and the coder agree on the terms and conditions of the work. This could include the expected deadline, the reporting structure, the stages in which the work gets done, the final ownership of the work, the fee disbursement terms, etc. Once you agree on these, you can let the coder work on your outsourced task.
Make sure that you track the work regularly and also intimate the coder of the changes as early as possible. This could also mean that you may have to change the deadlines and the costs too. If there are any such conversations it is always better to have to recorded and saved. These can prove very useful in case of conflict resolutions. Typically, the websites require that you carry out all the communication through their portal itself. Some of them do not admit offline correspondences in their conflict resolution process which can hurt your case adversely. Hence, always maintain a proper record of all your discussions.
If you follow these steps, you should have a good experience with outsource service providers. Once you understand the basics of how outsourcing functions online, you are set to exploit it to the best possible extent and make the most of it.