Outsourcing - the word everyone loves to hate. I was at a seminar last week talking about outsourcing with law firms. In the Q&A session that followed a delegate took it upon herself to grab the microphone and tell everyone never to even consider outsourcing because she had a bad experience! Luckily the voice of reason from another delegate who was able to tell of her good experience with outsourcing.

It is this kind of reaction that shows me just how unpopular and unrealistic the view is on outsourcing. If I put this in perspective, we as business people have all had employees in the past that did not work out for variety of reasons but none of us would stand up and say 'I tried to have an employee once but they did not work out - so I suggest that no one ever looks into employing a person again!'

Yes sometimes outsourcing fails to deliver the expected result, but there is always a very logical reason for this.

So let's look at some of the reasons why outsourcing fails.

1) The process is not clearly defined or properly mapped out.

This is especially prevalent in processes which are considered low value and low risk for example transcription services. Because anyone could type a letter or enter a purchase ledger invoice why spend valuable time on something that seems easy. And this is where it all goes wrong, your outsourcing provider will be bound by the written process document if they are ISO certified, so what happens where no punctuation is dictated? If you stick to the process  where this is undefined then you will receive an entire document returned with no punctuation. A worse case scenario is receiving a document with punctuation of the transcribers interpretation, thereby running the risk of changing the entire meaning of a sentence by the use of punctuation. Other things to consider are how are addresses written, how is capitalisation handled, how are numbers written? These things all need to be mapped out and believe me when I tell you this will be around 10 pages of documentation and this is just for transcription and I have not touched on Finance and Accounting.