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Professional managers in all disciplines strive for incremental business improvements. Project outsourcing has become an acceptable tool for efficiency gains. The introduction of on-line freelance marketplaces in South Africa is a welcome innovation. Early adapters are beginning to understand the benefits and gain competitive advantages hitherto unknown.
What is Project Outsourcing?
The exponential growth of the outsourcing industry is expected to continue unabated in 2006. Professional business managers in advertising, marketing and media recognize the value that project outsourcing brings to profitability.
Outsourcing projects that are not core business functions benefits through savings of time and money that decrease costs and improve profits.
Project Outsourcing simply means hiring a freelancer like a consultant or independent contractor to do a specific task for a business that does not have the time or the expertise to do it alone.
There are many forms of project outsourcing including Creative Writing, Copy Writing, Press Releases, Translation, Editing, Graphic Design, Multimedia and Photography.
Successful project outsourcing starts with a plan of action for hiring a freelancer for a specific task. That includes deciding what projects or tasks to outsource, who to hire for the project, how to manage the project to completion, what terms of payment to agree on, and how to evaluate the desired results.
Project outsourcing means improving profits through increasing productivity and lowering costs.
Making it easy
There are really excellent resources available for businesses looking to outsource project work. Freelanza.co.za, for example, enables anyone to offer a project to a project marketplace and receive bids from experts countrywide. The aim is to successfully match the project work with the right freelance professional and enjoy added benefits like payment management.
A project marketplace enables managers to use a well-known place to post their project, receive competing bids for the project, communicate with potential service providers, choose a winning bid (based on best price or on the credentials, expertise, promised delivery speed or prior feedback of a bidder), manage the project specifications, receive the delivered project and make final payment based on the terms of the project.
The on-line marketplace provided by Freelanza.co.za greatly streamlines the entire outsourcing process and enables the project manager to exercise remarkable control over the entire outsourcing process. Whats more theres no charge to the project manager. The successful service provider merely pays a small commission of 10% of the project fee.
The competitive advantage
Open competition for project work helps managers to maintain high quality and reduce cost. Freelance marketplaces improve the quality and value of service delivery by encouraging service providers to adjust to market conditions in order to win new business. Doing it on-line adds worthwhile benefits like:
Inviting competitive bids from freelance experts around South Africa and other parts of the world;
Exactly matching project specifications to available skills, specifying and controlling project requirements and maintaining budgetary discipline.
Enabling project managers easily to correspond with bidders, compare competing bids, and make payment simply and securely.
Manage risk, increase profit
Risks are inherent in any new business strategy but can be managed in order to benefit from obvious advantages.
The vastly increased talent pool accessible through freelance marketplaces leverages profit opportunities like never before.
The mere fact that freelancers usually works off-site is no real risk so long as there are well-defined contractual obligations and project reporting requirements.
Using an escrow account (available on-line at no extra charge) is a major safeguard in order to ensure that payment isnt released to the service provider until all project requirements are satisfactorily met.
Conclusion
The benefits of project outsourcing are becoming obvious to professional managers in advertising, marketing and media. The more innovative managers are embracing the concept in order to step up profitability. They are quick to appreciate the efficiency gains of adding resources without adding cost. Over time outsourcing will become common practice in South Africa. Using the Internet to improve the experience is a great step forward.
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