Tutorial: How To Outsource Content to India
Lesson 13: How can I track the status of my content development project?

chillibreeze writer — Trixie Asirvatham

I suppose most American or European customers have a fear of outsourcing a project to India. Perhaps they think they will not know what is happening with the project. They may wonder, whether the project is under control? What the status is? Whether they picked the right vendor? Perhaps all of this is just fear of the unknown.

A good vendor will recognize this and make sure there is a good flow of information both ways. The best way we have found to accomplish this is to stay in contact with the customer. You should request that you get at least this minimal level of email service. You should expect answers with 12 hours of any email question 6 days per week. . and you need to know that people are available.

Outsourcing is becoming a 24/7 global enterprise.

Besides people being available via email, you should find out whether your content provider has online collaboration software that allows you to keep track of the progress of your project. You can login and see progress on a daily or weekly basis.

This may be over doing it somewhat for most projects. At times it may be unnecessary and even can be time consuming and a real hassle for most projects. There are newer simpler online applications that allow Internet collaboration without a structured database or project management software.

The following online collaboration tools are similar to blogs and provide an easier alternative.

Iupload Our branded blogging platform lets you offer your own blogs to staff, partners, customers, or anyone else for that matter http://www.iupload.com/

Jotspot This is a very simple and easy to use platform for collaboration. Try the beta. http://www.jotspot.com/

Socialtext Over 100 organizations and 20 Global 1000 Enterprises use Socialtext to accelerate project cycles and help groups communicate more effectively than with email, while fostering trust, transparency and group memory. http://www.socialtext.com/

A good vendor will try and provide a balanced amount of information. For example, if you demand to see the work as it is being developed then it can be posted to a website. Then you should be able to maintain confidentiality and view content on a secure area of the vendor’s website. Once you provide feedback, it will be incorporated in the final content and delivered to you over the Internet in a secure fashion. Of course all this can be done via email to keep things simple.

The most important thing is reliable, clear, fast and honest communication via email. A quality trusting relationship is very important and dependent on good communication.

 

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Tutorial Contents:

Introduction | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

| Questionnaire | Quiz |