Interesting piece in the Daily Telegraph this morning about outsourcing. It's becoming more popular with small business, the piece says, but the Federation of Small Business is warning that it's not always a good idea.
What always surprises me is that people don't notice that they've been outsourcing for many years anyway. If you have an accountant, if you use BT or another supplier for your phone service, if you don't have your own power generator, you're outsourcing at least something. In these examples you're doing traditional outsourcing - getting someone with the right skills in to do something you can't.
The trend now appears to be to get someone in to do something you probably could but would rather not. This is where the business case needs to be solid, and I believe that's where a lot of outsourcing falls down - it's applied as a panacea rather than as a solution to an individual business problem, and funnily enough panaceas don't always work.
Have any readers any experience of outsourcing, good or bad? What were your objectives, and how did you evaluate the project and measure its performance?
