The General Steps
In Outsourcing
You need an organized approach for both types of
outsourcing—technical and political. These types are surfaced here because the
introduction has been paved with the preceding discussion. A technical vendor is
one that will perform specific business or technical work, independent of
politics. A political vendor is someone that you require to do business in the
specific location. So there are many combinations of these two. You can, for
example, have many political vendors and only one or two technical vendors. A
political vendor is usually limited to a specific country.
The steps in outsourcing are shown in Fig. 8.1. In the first step, you want to identify what
can be outsourced. You will have to be creative in an international project
since you have to include political factors. You should consider hiring one
consultant to determine what you need in political outsourcing. Then you would
hire another, different vendor for the political work. This sounds weird to
people academically, but in the real world you are dealing with a culture about
which you have limited knowledge. The National Geographic or the Discovery
Channel don’t help much here—this is the seamy world of politics in a locale
strange to you. Get used to it!
Assessing the risks and benefits forces you to determine in more
detail what the vendors will do. You have to weigh what would happen if you
didn’t have a vendor, remembering that in many cases you have no choice.
The third step is to determine what is to be outsourced. In the
first step you have defined the potential scope and then you analyzed it in the
second step.
Preparing for outsourcing can mean getting the organization
ready to accept the outsourcing firm. If the employees and managers are not used
to international projects, then they will likely question having some of the
vendors. You should mount an education campaign to inform them of the
alternative of doing it themselves. Here it is useful to highlight a few
language and cultural issues. This will bring them down to earth rather quickly
from experience.
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