Outsourcing Update: Part 2

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By Brick | January 30, 2008

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In a previous post I described my first attempt at outsourcing. I was diligently trying to ship some software programming work overseas. Please don’t tell Lou Dobbs! At the same time, I decided to test a theory: could I find better freelancers through programming forums instead of using popular outsourcing sites such as Elance.

The World Isn’t Flat

Here are the results of this first foray into outsourcing:

Elance: I received a single bid at over double the quoted budget.
Ajay: By way of background, Ajay was the programmer I found myself through Planet Source Code. After sending the proposed job description and requesting a quote, he disappeared for over a week. After a week he communicated that he was on a vacation in his village and would get back to me when he returned to the city. After another week he did get back to me asking for more details on the job and timing (which was, in my opinion, quite clearly indicated in the original job description I sent).

Hardly inspiring! I was looking forward to comparing Ajay’s quote against a myriad of bids on Elance. So this was a bit of a set back. Without at least two competing bids, I had decided beforehand not to outsource this work because, as a rule of thumb, I think you need at least two options before you making any spending decision. What did I learn from this exercise?

I think the task, while described quite well and at a great deal of detail (as per best practices), was too complicated. It involved some binary file formats, and while an intermediate to advanced programmer in North America would have easily been able to complete this work, I wonder if most freelance programmers (or the owners of the companies bidding on Elance) are more interested in mundane, brainless work.
There is a definite risk depending on a single resource versus a company. As the proposal exercise aptly illustrates, Ajay represents a “single point of failure”. Without a firm or backup team behind Ajay, there is no fallback support. This was only the proposal, one can easily imagine the risk when depending on a sole operator to actually get the work done.
Another issue with going to someone directly is that you have to be prepared for the fact that they may not actually be interested in doing certain work. This is what I think happened with Ajay. Since I had worked with him on a project before, I think he was afraid to simply decline the work, and so delayed his response and asked for information already provided to further delay having to respond.

Plan B

Despite the lack of success with outsourcing this particular project, this story does have a happy ending: I was able to find a company that provides a ready made component that does what I was looking for, and in fact, provides even more functionality than I currently require. The cost of a royalty free developers license was within my budget. So for this job, the classic buy versus build was perhaps more relevant than outsourcing in the first place! I was therefore able to eliminate the need to perform this task. As I have mentioned before: favour elimination over automation.

Segue To Product Endorsement

How has this experience helped me? In my day job, I meet a lot of people, and over time I end up with a massive pile of business cards. When the pile reaches a critical height, I start to enter them into my contact manager/database. This, to say the least, is a tedious data entry exercise. I know what you’re thinking - I could outsource this work! However, based on the experience above, I wondered: is there a way to simply eliminate the data entry? Of course there is a way! I purchased a CardScan Personal v8. Within minutes I was able to scan a large pile of cards. The accuracy of the character recognition is excellent. Besides automatically populating my contact database, the contact management software that comes with the unit is pretty good in its own right - with the added bonus of retaining an image of the scanned business card. So in the end I would say, before outsourcing anything, look to see if any technology already exists that can equally get the job done.