The pros and cons of outsourcing

There is no doubt that outsourcing has hit the mainstream business community over the last few years or so; but these are some of the pros and cons of outsourcing.

Easy access through the Internet to overseas resources has made outsourcing much easier, much cheaper and more secure than before.

It is so tempting just to go for the cheap option to save a few bucks, without considering all factors.

There are still many, many traps to be aware of.

A medical transcriptionist working in a medica... — A medical transcriptionist working in a medical transcription outsourced environment. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It started many years ago when local professionals provided their services on an hourly rate basis so that business owners did not need to employ a full-time resource that they could not fully utilise.

Bookkeepers, clerical staff, even some labourers, were able to work for a business on an as-needs basis, and they could do this often without actually coming to the business premises.

This was another saving for the business owner as they did not need to provide the office space and resources for that team member that are usually a very high overhead cost.

Even though these resources were often more expense on a per hour basis than their full-time counterparts, the savings came from the reduced hours they worked and other overheads that were reduced or eliminated.

With the growth and acceptance of the internet over the years, more and more resources became available online (off-shore), including many resources that were originally only engaged locally.

It has come to the point now where it is quite easy to engage someone from India or Pakistan or wherever, to build a website for what seems like a fraction of the price locally. BUT . . .

Our experiences

We certainly have used these resources in the past, and have even been tempted to trial them again. After-all, we would be negligent in our duty to our clients to provide cost-effective solutions if we did not look into this option from time to time.

So we are speaking from first hand experience here when we say . . .

“It really IS a nightmare!”

Even for an experienced, professional team like ours, working with these offshore resources is generally hard work and can frequently be described as a nightmare.

We have to factor in the time that we spend monitoring and correcting the results, as well as re-doing a lot of the work ourselves in-house.

So, for a local business owner who perhaps does not have as much technical or IT experience, it really is a trap that will cost them many hours of frustration and thousands of dollars more than they expected.

Why am I on fire about this just now ?

Why I am writing about this now is because we are having that exact experience again.

We recently outsourced the construction of a trial website to an Australian company who provided outsourced resources from overseas. It was an interesting mix that we thought would work because there was Australian involvement.

Surely dealing with a local company would give us more control and better results, we thought. But as we monitored the results, we were sorely disappointed.

Regrettably, this Australian based company did not feel any obligation to train or monitor their staff.

They seemed to feel that it was okay that their staff caused serious coding problems in the websites that they worked on due to their inexperience and apparent lack of knowledge and understanding about how website code actually works.

And that visual defects were our responsibility to detect and correct.

Lower cost = poor quality work

Not surprisingly they used the lower cost as justification for providing us with inferior resources. But when it comes to getting a website that actually works, inferior results simply are not acceptable.

We have to factor in the time that we spend monitoring and correcting the results, as well as re-doing a lot of the work ourselves in-house.

So ultimately, it costs us as much, if not a lot more, to outsource off-shore!

Following is the email communication, (from one of my local techs), which prompted me to write this scathing blog post about outsourcing and offshore resources.

This website is a real mess. I have tweaked a couple of things but have had to download the code which will need careful going through.
Yep it is right mess. I basically have to re-engineer it so I can pinpoint where the issues lie and then hopefully fix it. Working on it today full-time.
Thanks, D
I was a worried about that . . . that’s why this guy is not on our team 🙁
cheers . . . Philip

Some of the results . . .

Here’s what we encountered on the trial website that we asked them to produce for us.

Immediately visible:

Low quality graphics
Unreadable menus
Poor selection of contrasting colours, making text almost impossible to read
Text not aligned with him appropriate panels, so some text not readable
Poor alignment of the pages
Whole pages where text is not visible against the background colour

Behind the scenes:

Poorly written code making it impossible or impractical to understand and correct easily
Written procedures not followed

Imagine electrical wiring . . .

Imagine the electrical wiring of your house. It’s a complex network of wires running all over the place.

English: How to install wiring outdoors? -Ther... — English: How to install wiring outdoors? -There should be reliable protection against water hiting to metal parts (which are under voltage). To do this, the cable should placed inside conduit, connections should be placed inside IP65 or higher junction box and joining between conduit and junction box should be hermetically closed by nuts with rubber ring. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now imagine that the wires were randomly connected to different fuses (safety switches), so that lights were on the hot water fuse and the stove wired on the lighting fuses, etc.

Imagine trying to fix a problem in the lighting wiring that was actually connected to the hot water power supply. That’s a recipe for electrocution right there.

Even my most experienced (local) technician gets frustrated when we trial offshore resources because they simply do not listen to the instructions that they are given. Or if they do understand, they just ignore them and do not follow them.

We haven’t even touched on the subject of language and communication in this article. Imagine that your electrician barely had any grasp of English !! And yet you want him to fix something that, if left unattended, could burn your house down.

Nor have we touched on the subject of turning up to work. Different rules seem to apply in these countries, where they might vanish for several weeks at a time.