A lesson in Outsourcing

I have a problem, in scheduling my work I have shot myself in the foot and put two complicated projects on top of one another. I have a choice, I can have a week of late nights to make up the time or I can find  a web developer to pick up some of the load. I decide to go fishing for someone to build a WordPress plugin.

The Assumptions

1. Everyone bidding for this project will be capable of completing the project
2. The worst a person can do is provide me working – but substandard – work

My Goals

1. Get the lowest price possible to keep up my margins
2. Find someone who can turn around this project in 2 days

The Reality

1. Not everyone bidding for the project was actually capable of doing this project
2. The worst I could get was something that didn’t meet the very specific brief and didn’t work.
3. The person I picked cannot speak English and is only familiar with canned answers.

In my rush to secure the lowest price and fastest turn around I didn’t properly vet the person I selected. I gave them the work and left him to it. 2 days later I am sent something that I didn’t expect. The developer copied and pasted the functionality of as many video plugins he could find into one single plugin. He didn’t include any code to let WordPress recognise the plugin. Even more worryingly. On closer inspection, in the 1800 line plugin he sent me. 0 lines would have achieved the goal I set him.

I figured that considering the tight deadline and low budget the developer would send me some working, ugly, ‘hacked together’ code. I could then spend a few hours on it to tidy it up and get it up to the standard that my clients expected. Unfortunately this assumption was wrong. I got my money back from the developer. Gave him a bad a review and stayed up very late writing it myself.

Funnily enough a week later I had another project to post. The same developer got in touch promising results, promising to make up for what had happened. I am fairly sure he still doesn’t understand what WordPress is.

The lessons I learnt.

1. Ask the person lots of questions to fully gauge their English skills
2. Examine their portfolio more closely to determine whether the work is actually theirs or a copy and paste job
3. Approach people that work weekends with caution

What is your experience with outsourcing? Do you do it? Have you learnt any lessons from hiring outsiders?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.