Outsourcing: Yea or Nay

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Friday, February 29th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

One of the big considerations when you are planning your project is whether or not you will outsource (or out-task - topic for a different post). As I’m sure you know, outsourcing is the hiring out of work. This is done primarily to free up your time to work on the more important parts of your business, such as the marketing.

Many things can be outsourced, including content creation, web site design and management, security, and the list goes on. But why are we discussing this here?

When you are planning your projects, you need to know who will be doing the work. Not necessarily the exact “who”, but will it be you or someone else. If it is someone else, this is another resource you need for your project, and should be accounted for in your resource list.

Actually, the way I prefer to do this is to list out all the resources you need anyway, and then assign jobs to the resources, whether me or someone else. This way I can more easily reuse parts of my plans in future projects.

To explain another way, if you are the writer, and you are the web designer, and you are the graphics designer, and you are the script installer, and so on, you fill each of these roles. However, that doesn’t mean that your project didn’t need a script installer resource, or a graphic designer resource. Do you see where I’m going? You might be the chief cook and bottle washer, but all of these jobs still require a resource, even if that resource is you.

And often if your just starting out, they are all you. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take each job into consideration separately in your plan. Besides re-usability, there is another good reason to do this.

If, in the middle of your project, you determine you can’t complete the content in time. You can make the choice to hire this out. You have these tasks separated in your plan, so you can easily determine what you need him to do. On small projects, like what I’m showing you in the case study, it may seem obvious what is needed from each resource, but in a larger undertaking you might not find it so easy.

Anyway, just wanted to throw out this topic. Remember to always define each resource based on the job performed, even if you are the only actual human resource involved.

Cheers,

Chris

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