Project Outsourcing

I have probably touched on this topic before but haven't really done anything until recently. I started doing homework on outsourcing life and was pleasantly surprised with the things I found.

I started with a trial on this website: www.asksunday.com. This is highly recommended by many users and they have a special way of working. You can either purchase the service of a dedicated Virtual Assistant or you can purchase requests. Requests are typical tasks that will not exceed 20minutes of work on either the internet or the phone.

Every request is charged at about USD$3. I wasn't sure if I was going to require this type of service so I asked for a free trial of 4 requests for a week. I found it wasn't really that easy to think of tasks to outsource. So as a start, I asked for a 20 minute research to compare prices of web hosting services.

Of course the task was not going to be executed immediately unless I gave it to a dedicated assistant, which helped me realize that any urgent tasks should not be outsourced. 4 hours later, I received the compiled list on my iPhone. The quality of work was astounding. In that 20 minutes, the assistant checked out the different web hosting services, checked out reviews of these services and gave his opinion on the top 5 providers. This was more than What I asked for.

I would think purchasing these requests would help for tasks with the following nature:

(1) To pass an information to someone and make sure he/she receives the message. A phone call made by a virtual assistant will save time if the phone call has to be made multiple times before the person picks up.

(2) Web researches. If you are compiling a report or trying to make a decision, you may have several topics to research on. Engaging the Virtual assistants to perform these researches will save a lot of time

(3) To do data entry. Scan the things you want to convert into data and email to the assistants.

However, I found that these tasks were too trivial and started to look for a dedicated assistant. Asksunday was offering a dedicated assistant at US$12 per hour. A little too high for my budget. Thus, I started experimenting on www.elance.com.

Elance is an online platform that help match employers with free lance professionals. I started with a US$5/hr project with one offshore company, which helped me with internet research, time sheet management and compilation of reports. Apart from administrative work, I was also able to outsource part of my iPhone programming to free lance programmers.

This has got me more all excited. Within a week, I found I was performing more project management than doing the actual ground work myself. It got me focused on the important tasks that cannot be outsourced (Or can they?) and also spent more time on decision making.

However, managing the Virtual assistants and the free lance programmers wasn't always a breeze. Communication has to be clear and instructions have to be passed down properly. It would be nice if a system can be established to mange this. And this led me to design a template for this system. The next phase of the experiment is to test if this system works.

More updates!