Success factors in outsourcing

Outsourcing helps your business by allowing it to focus its energies and resources on its core strengths. However, the success of outsourcing depends on a lot of factors, the top of which comes from you, the party that decides on whether outsourcing will actually help you achieve your business goals.

What are the success factors involved in outsourcing? The list can be very long, as it all depends on a company’s goals, size, budget, and the risks it is willing to take. The following are some common ways to make an outsourcing project successful:

• Identify your business goals. Know why you are outsourcing in the first place. Is it to cut costs? Is it to have more flexibility in growing your manpower? Is it to provide better customer service? The most common reason behind outsourcing is to cut costs. However, this poses a risk in the long run. There are savings that can be made by shipping some business processes to low-wage economies, but make sure that you also get more value for how little you are willing to spend in terms of process improvement, quality, and customer satisfaction.
• Choose your vendor carefully. Before signing an agreement with a vendor, make sure that you have made ample background checks for its financial stability, management team, flexibility, workforce, and best of all, the methodologies that it implements in the course of your project cycle. Search for reference that will vouch for the capabilities of the vendor. This is the third party that will handle part of your business. No matter the size, each part of your overall operations plays a crucial role in your business success. Choose your vendor well.
• Engage everyone’s support. Everyone from all levels of the organization should support the involvement of outsourced personnel–or consultants–in the project. Top executives should buy in to the project because they are ultimately responsible for the venture. Regular employees should show not see outsourcing as a threat to their employment.
• Agree on project management methodologies, and training and communication plans. Depending on the complexity of the project, there is a high learning curve involved at the start of the project. Make sure that prior to the start of the project’s outsourcing, all blueprints are laid out. Communication and training plans, implementations methods, channels and facilities are crucial in the knowledge transfer. And most of all, the project methodologies should be agreed upon in order to keep risks at minimum levels.

Outsourcing Success Story: An Award Winning Application