Insourcing advantages

When you outsource a project you give up control. Perhaps the person you gave the project to will be offered a full time job right after they accept your project. In an ideal world they would either meet their commitment to you before starting there new job, or at the very least they would immediately notify you that they are going to bail out on you. An outside person often has no real investment in your project’s success. If an easier,higher paid or more fun project module comes along, they are likely to work on it first, and leave your project on the back burner, resulting in delays that can hold up the rest of your project. Many projects modules require substantial communication between the person requesting the work, and the person actually performing it. If you have to replace your outside contractor, then all the time you spent communicating with them, and training them to work on it, will go for nothing.

There is another problem with outside contractors -unlike employees, they are not already on your payroll. This means that every little job they do for you costs you money.

While your regular employees have to be paid, everything they do does not always cost you money. Take a moment when you are driving past a construction crew to watch them in action. More often than not, one or two of them are working, while three or four others stand around watching them. This is not because they are lazy. It is not even totally because road construction is a hard job, that few people can work at constantly, especially in the heat. There is another reason that they stand around- it is simply that person B cannot perform their task until person A performs theirs.This type of situation occurs in almost every type of business, from fast food restaurants to advertising firms, to manufacturing firms. There are many other reasons that keep people from working constantly, from seasonal and hourly work load variations, to waiting for project approvals from above.

The reason that most operations can’t always make use of the unproductive time that their employees have, is that often those employees are in a different department, and sometimes in a different building. With a good intranet or even a decent internet connection, existing employees can be used to complete project segments in departments other than their own. What you need is software that allows you to list the tasks you need done, and employees to ‘bid’ on jobs they want to perform.

Don’t worry that they will feel put upon when they lose their non-working moments. Good employees like to work. The worst thing about many jobs is often sitting around trying to look busy. Your employees have a vested interest in completing the tasks in a prompt and quality manner. They know their careers depend on it! You will also find that worker satisfaction will actually increase, because people are choosing the tasks that they want to do the most. With the right software, you keep full control over who is actually allowed to perform any given task, and you have total control over tracking the whole project!

With insourcing you take advantage of the skills, knowledge and training that your employees already have and you may also discover a person with talents you didn’t know about -a person you can promote.

I think you’ll have to agree -’insourcing advantages’ beat ‘outsourcing advantages’ , hands down.