Do any of you who freelance ever outsource any part of a job that you take on for a client? If so, are they aware of the outsourcing, or not? Where do you find your vendors, locally or on freelancing sites, etc? How do you guarantee the quality of their work if you’re putting your name on it?
I’m just wondering what solutions people have to doing this in a trustworthy, efficient way.
A secondary part, I suppose, is why do you outsource, if you do (or why not)? Do you do it to allow you to take on jobs that you don’t have all the requisite skills for (ex. PHP dev tackles a PHP job that includes some UI design, outsources to a designer)? Or do you do it so that you can make more money by farming out work to people who will take a lower rate, and act as an account manager of sorts? What’s your rationale, and is it worth it in the end?
Just curious, was talking to someone about this subject earlier and I realized I don’t know what a lot of people in our industry do about this sort of thing.
I’ve outsourced parts of a job before. Several actually, as they required a skillset that I didn’t quite have at the time, one was for report building in an application I was hired to do. I didn’t disclose that I outsourced part of the task, as it didn’t alter the the clients pocket book, and it didn’t alter the timeline. It actually shortened the timeline by 2 weeks because he was able to do his work while I still worked on the rest of the application.
For me it went well, I got exactly what I needed and the quality was good. This was years ago though and I have no idea how I even found the guy, so I guess I got lucky that the experience was good.
I have done so a few times, but more often I’m on the other end of the stick. It’s mostly been when I need a graphic designer to do a really nice design, or a backed dev to do some magic, or a CMS ninja to do something more sophisticated than I can.
In my experience (more of being used for outsource work), the client is always aware of it, and often communicates with the outsourcee (if that word exists).
I do a fair bit of outsourcing work for various graphic designers (coding up things they’ve designed), so it’s mostly done because they don’t have the skills. A small % of the time, though, it’s just so that they can take on more clients when they don’t have enough time to do the work themselves.
That’s my experience too, I’ve only done it a time or two, but I’ve been the “outsourcee” more often. And in those situations, all but one, the client knew it was outsourced, and as you say, communicated directly with me at times. In the one case, the programmer just didn’t have the time to do the job, so he quoted it and then just offered it to me and shaved off a finder’s fee and overhead time.
This is not really the norm, but it could happen on smaller projects I guess.
If you put yourself in the clients shoes, why should he care or even want to talk to the person you outsource to? After all, he/she has hired you to do their project.
Outsourcing work can turn out to be a blessing, or a curse. It all depends on your management skills and the person/team you outsource to.
We did do a lot of outsourcing in the past, but in the long run it just meant more hassle than it was worth compared to having in-house staff. Right now we only outsource complicated issues we need help to solve, in these cases we always know who we want to hire before we give the client a proposal.
In short, cultural differences will be your biggest obstacle if you decide to outsource to another country. This basically means that when you say A, the person you outsource it to might believe you meant B. If the expectations are not monitored closely, the project could turn out pretty bad.
Between US/Canada and Western Europe the culture and habits is very similar, so it is less of a problem (but it is still there is differences, so misunderstandings can happen). If you outsource to Asia, Eastern Europe etc. then you will have a huge difference in culture and habits.
The only way to handle this, is by making certain the person you outsource to really understand the specifications. Make them explain it back to you with their own words. (On a side note, be especially careful if you work with someone from Asia and they say they can do this.)
We have a clause in our contract that allow us to outsource any part of the project if we deem that necessary to ensure the quality of the project.
Other than that, we never let the client know if we bring on outside talent (outsource) on parts of or even the whole project. As I mentioned above, the client does not care how you complete their project, only that you do at the quality you promised them.
Finding someone locally will make the project management easier, since you will in most cases not have any cultural differences. But it also means your profit from outsourcing this part will be smaller.
Looking through freelancing websites can be a good solution to find someone for smaller and simple projects. Just keep in mind that many completed projects and a good rating does not really matter if they were all for $5.
As time goes, you will manage to sort through the jungle and find persons/companies you want to work with. When this happen it is important that you do not lose them, and have to start over again looking for someone new.
This is the difficult part if you are not able to vet the work yourself. Then you either need to trust them, or better bring in a third part to review the code base. Though keep in mind that the third party has to review the code base for security concerns and code execution, not for coding style etc.
In the end, you are hired to do the project for the client, if the person you outsourced to are not able to complete the work up to standard, it is your problem. This means, by having a bad outsource experience could actually mean that you go from profit to loss on the project, due to you need to hire someone else to complete the work.
Yeah, it really depends on what the outsourcer is doing. If it’s a designer, say, it can be a real pain to transfer messages back and forth between client and designer, and makes more sense to me just to get them to talk to each other. But if it’s just some backend coding, yeah, no need to involve the client.
