My experiences with outsourcing to the Philippines

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I haven’t updated this blog for some time and it is basically because I have had trouble finding the right person (from the Philippines) to hire for the writer position.

The candidate I had chosen turned me down in the last minute, so I had to start out a round 2. Basically I had chosen someone with too much work on her hands, and she did not have the time to write a full e-book. So for round 2 of the hiring I looked for someone who had the time to begin with (and not the one with the most experience).

Regarding the title of this post and my experiences with outsourcing to the Philippines… I have had Ryan on board since 1. July (this year 2009) and he has done a good job. We have of course had a few misunderstandings, but not more than you would expect from working on the opposite side of the globe from each other. Lately he has been away and this was a big surprise to me as he forgot to tell me that he could not be reached by email (or I did not do a good enough job of telling him that I want to know these things).

So if I had to make a short list of stuff I have learned, it would probably look like the following:

Find your preferred way of communication

I have used email a lot and only called Ryan through Skype a few times, but a friend of mine who has just hired his sixth guy from the Philippines are doing daily Skype calls with all of them.

If you are going to use Skype in your daily communication remember the time difference. I could not maintain a daily skype call as I typically work for clients on location during my normal business hours, and I really don’t want to spend my evenings making Skype calls (also it is night in the Philippines when I get from work here in Denmark).

I told Ryan that I wanted daily status mails on how a task was progressing. He has not been super good at remembering this. So I have just created an account over at 14days where I expect everybody that I hire either full- or part-time to register their hours spent as well as a short description of the work.

Give good task descriptions and remember background information

When outsourcing it is extremely important to break down your work into manageable tasks that can easily be done. Personally I have used the format specified by Tim Ferris (I’m not completely sure that this is how he describes it in his book, but it is how I remember it ): What I want done, How I want it done and When I want it done.

Lately I have also begun to include background information describing Why I want it done. This sometimes help to give an overall scope of the task and keep a big focus while working on different small otherwise unrelated tasks.

Accept that there will be hick-ups along the way

Of course there will be times where you will misunderstand each other or you have not described a task well enough. The good thing is that you have the person full time and because of this have time to fix the task the right way. If you had just outsourced a project, on say elance, only to find out that some part of the project wasn’t done just right, you would have had to create a new project to have this fixed and perhaps tell yet another company about the project. I really like to have a person that I can have a history with.

Learn to identify processes

If there is anything that you can see you would like to have done again (and again), say setting up a wordpress blog, consider making your guy document the process. This way if you were to hire another employee (from the Philippines or not) you could use this process description (or perhaps screencast) to show him/her what you expect. Currently I do a lot of this for my webshop business Get A Shop, where I sell Magento webshops. We have to deliver the same product over and over again, so all processes have been documented on an intranet (a Google site).

And remember to have fun while outsourcing to the Philippines!