“Outsource everything except your soul”, the excitable American writer Tom Peters, best known for In Search Of Excellence, once exhorted. And organisations all over the globe have responded with a will. Want someone to develop a computer or a fridge for you? Old hat. How about an entire car or even a house? Done. Outsourcing is a great way of getting things done and when it comes to IT, outsourcing to an agency can bring more rewards than getting it done through remote resources.

Business enterprises have a lot of things to consider before going all out for an agency or remote staffing. Strategising wisely is the key to choose between an agency and remote resources.

Tasks and Projects for Outsourcing

Outsourcing refers to the practice of hiring specialists or generalists for doing tasks that are traditionally managed within a team or an organisation. These tasks can be comprised of web development, travel arrangements, social media management, IT support and many more. Outsourcing frees time for full-time staff and lets them focus on more revenue-driving tasks.

Outsourcing is the practice of hiring specialists or generalists for doing tasks that are traditionally managed within a team or an organisation

Before outsourcing a task or project, there is a checklist of questions that can be raised:

• Is the task that you are trying to outsource a primary service or benefit of your business offering? If yes, you may consider hiring someone internally to scale company growth effectively. Otherwise, it might be a task worth outsourcing.
• Is outsourcing a particular task going to open up a lot of free time for you to grow your core business or product? If yes, go for it.
• Is it going to cost lesser while outsourcing a certain task in comparison to hiring someone new or tackling the task internally? Outsource it if the answer is yes.
• Is it possible that someone else can finish off the task with great efficacy and quicker than your internal team? Outsourcing it is the best option if the answer is yes.
• Is this task a one-time thing or very rare to come by? If so, it is better to outsource it.
• Is it going to give you a competitive advantage to manage this task in-house? If so, hiring a staff or completing this project internally is better.

Here are some of the things that can be outsourced:

• Design and marketing tasks: Web application development, web maintenance, competitive and industry research, press release writing etc.
• Administrative tasks: Data entry, Calendar scheduling, File management, Client invoicing etc.
• Sales and support: Lead generation, expense report creation, customer service, etc.
• HR and operations: IT support, payroll, contract management, candidate screening tests etc.
• Personal tasks: Personal errands, an appointment with a doctor, shopping, meal preparation etc.

Outsourcing Types, Staff Augmentation and Remote Resources

Outsourcing is an umbrella term that constitutes a few more specific definitions.

• Onshoring: This is one of the ways of outsourcing. When the external party which is assisting you, that is your ‘outsource’, is in the same country as your headquarters.
• Nearshoring: This is a different form of outsourcing where you hire an external party that is located in a neighbouring country.
• Offshoring: When you take one or more of your processes and get them done in a distant country, it is referred to as offshoring.
• Multisourcing: It is the term that is used to describe outsourcing business processes to several vendors thereby diversifying the risk in vendor operations.

Other than the outsourcing types that are based on the location of the outsourcing company, there is an outsourcing model called staff augmentation that is helpful for describing the relationships between the client and the IT outsourcing vendor.

Staff augmentation

Envisage that your company lands itself in the middle of a big project and you happen to need SQL experts in-house, but only through the duration of the project. This is when the need arises for you to think about Staff Augmentation. It allows you to bring qualified workers in-house to collaborate with full-time employees to meet the ever-changing demands.

This is how we enable staff augmentation!
Our white label offering enables the organisations to retain profitable clients with our robust expertise. Our staff augmentation approach helps you as per your requirements. Our approach helps you stay resilient and flexible in business. It helps you augment your existing staff with our seasoned developers. Thus, by keeping things in-house, our approach reduces the risk that can accompany with outsourcing to an agency.

Staff augmentation helps you augment your existing staff with our seasoned developers

So where does remote staffing come in all of these?

Remote resources

When you outsource your business activities to an agency, you are not interested in who does the work as it is the responsibility of the organisation to which you contract out your activities.
 
When you use remote staff, you hire them, govern their performance directly and you fire them if they are not in compliance with their contracts of employment.
 
The only difference between remote staff and regular staff is that the remote staff works from a location that is outside of the immediate confines of your business premises. Remote staff can work from home, or from a remote office, or can even go location-agnostic and work from their vehicles. They can work a few miles away from your premises or in a different country altogether.

Outsourcing to an agency vs remote resources

Outsourcing to an agency is advantageous:

• Cost-effective: You get to relish the significant cost savings when you outsource to an agency which is located in a country with lower production costs. A lower cost of living for employees would mean that it will involve lower salaries as well as lower infrastructural and operational costs.
• Diversified talent pool: Having an agency as your collaboration partner allows you to reach professionals that may in short supply or even unavailable locally.
• Time-saving: Partnering with an outsourcing vendor does not require you to advertise for, interview, select and train in-house employees which would otherwise prove very time-intensive.
• Faster upscaling: Outsourcing to an agency gives you the ability to upscale fast. You will get to work with new clients and take on new projects.
• No interruptions in the workflow: Outsourcing to an agency can allow your business to work round the clock. Thanks to the time difference between the in-house team and the outsourcing vendor’s team.

In contrast, outsourcing to remote staff can be troublesome:

• In a nutshell, it is an arduous task to find the right people. However, this is also the case with full-time on-site staff. It is a formidable thing to know an individual’s inner struggles, habits or attitudes from one solitary meeting. Similarly, a string of messages and Skype calls can never be satisfactory.
• With no exception of whatsoever, your remote resources should self-motivated and autonomously proactive individuals. Lack of these qualities will have repercussions on the productivity of the remote staffing thus affecting your company’s growth.
• Establishing processes can be a colossal challenge in the early stages of growth especially while handling disparate teams. As team members come and go, new ideas come up for managing the delivery of our work. Ever more intricate processes develop as a team grows and new systems get entangled with legacy processes.
• It is difficult to monitor the morale of people who you do not see every day which can become a significant problem if left unaccounted for.

Success stories of outsourcing to an agency

Alibaba in the making

For many, Alibaba is China’s eBay but very few know that it actually started as a small internet company called China Yellow Pages. Today, Alibaba is amongst the biggest global marketplace.

Alibaba outsourced the website development to an American firm when the company was in its early stages

According to the book ‘Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and Creation of the World’s Biggest Online Marketplace’, Jack Ma outsourced the website development to an American firm when the company was in its early stages. This was at the time when the development talent in China was in short supply while developers in the US had the skills that Alibaba was looking for. Outsourcing to the firm helped them grow into what they are today leveraging all the talent they got from the agency. 

Slack in the making

Slack, an online collaboration tool application for teams based on Instant Messaging, was launched in 2013 by four founders namely Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov. Before opening it up for the first beta testers, Slack’s development was outsourced to a design firm which managed app, website and even their logo.

Slack’s development was outsourced to a design firm which managed app, website and even their logo.

Once the product was good enough for the founders, they went on to invite other users and teams to test it out and give their valuable feedback.

The bottom line

Evidently, the motto of ‘let’s grow together’ can be seen while outsourcing where we are seeking the talent pool of an external resource to get things done. Outsourcing is an astounding way of growing your business and is even better when you start realising such a collaborative way of doing business is actually helping you as well as the ‘outsource’.
 
Outsourcing to an agency can be a better option than going for remote staffing for the very reasons that we have stated in this blog. In addition to staff augmentation, Opensense Labs have been powering digital transformation endeavours of businesses with a suite of services.
 
Contact us at [email protected] to know how outsourcing your business activities can be helpful.