Businesses are accepting outsourcing as a means to leverage tasks and help with gaps in skills and personnel. In fact, entire business functions are offloaded to companies specializing in those functions. However, the efforts of these groups still need to be managed. They also have their own set of challenges that can be helped by time management.
When you outsource certain aspects of your business, you become a project manager. The ideal situation would be to funnel off work to the outsourcers, and they produce the agreed upon work on time and within the budget. The reality is it never works out exactly as you planned. You need to get involved with the groups you are using to perform the work.
As a newly-labeled project manager, you will need to make sure the sum of the parts fits together, so to speak. You will need to deal with dependencies, to ensure that each group has what they need. Don’t assume that the groups will communicate with each other. They are separate units and require someone to coordinate all the necessary components. In the project management world, this is known as the critical path. One path cannot continue until something before it gets completed. You have to make sure that happens.
Even if the functions required of your outsourcers are not complex, you still need to manage their time. Too many managers or business owners have let outsourcers go off on their own, only to find the job is not complete or has not been done exactly as agreed. It’s too big a risk to leave things to chance. Be proactive and insist on progress reports.
It’s important to remember that you don’t want to start managing your outsourcers at a granular level. The whole point of outsourcing is to let them take tasks off your to-do list. You have to strike a balance between keep chasing them and letting them get their work done. The great news about outsourcing is that you can choose an alternative company if one is not good at managing their time.
When using outsourcers, you have to fit what they produce within your organization. That means you need to get other internal people involved with the specifications of the work you are offloading. If you don’t get this correct, you will tell the outsourcers to do the wrong tasks. However, they did what they were told to do, so you will still need to pay them, and then have them do the work over and pay them for that, as well.
– Scott Blessing