How To Equip Your Outsource Provider With The Right Tools

Business Outsourcing,Outsourcing Tips,Outsourcing Outsource

As soon as a new outsource provider, the use of Basecamp is introduced to him right away. This is the teams daily means of communication. Before we found out the benefits of Basecamp, we have been using Gmail to send all our emails back and forth. The problem we encountered here is that we needed to have a project manager who will be able to keep track of everything.

If becomes a member of our SEO company or another team member started to work with an assistant because someone else was away, then they wouldnt know where things were up to. So we use Basecamp as a centralized place to check in and see where the assistants are up to and do the day by day communication.

Basecamp may be unknown to you. If you research about it, you will see different ways of using it more than just sending emails. There are other ways we have created to address individual tasks and individual processes in connection with SEO services. This is usually based on tasks. For example article writing and other tasks that are related to it stand under one section. This is how the assistants work on them on a daily basis.

However, such practice did not go well. And we have decided that the best way to use it is have a thread for each outsource provider. Then, we did provide each assistant with that thread.

We have something that we call start of the day calls. This is the job of the project manager. In here, the project manager chats with the assistants. Everything that they will be able to talk about will be documented in the Basecamp. In a start of day call he chats with them to get them up to speed and then those bullet points are logged in. This gives me or others who jump in, an overview of what has been talked about or whats been communicated. So usually it goes supervisor, person, supervisor, person, supervisor, assistant.

To get on top of every assistants daily task or SEO training, we use an end of day emails which is another good mean of avoiding one of the cons of outsourcing miscommunication. Here, everything an assistant accomplishes with in the day and the things she needs to work on are recorded. We just use Basecamp as a centralized place for communication with each assistant, so that a supervisor can jump in and see exactly where the process is up to.

Let us see what an end of day email exactly contains. Primarily, it shows what an assistant have worked on for the day along with the exact time they have been accomplished. Theyll bullet point what it is that theyve worked on and then the amount of time it took them. I use this to know the time each outsource provider spends in doing a task. We have an expected time of how long exactly each task should be accomplished in an average among all the different assistants.