Starting to get Frustrated
I am currently working on a brand new project. I have approached this new project in a completely different way than I would normally do. I have a plan, schedule, and budget. The schedule necessitates that I can`t do all of the work myself, which is fine because I made a budget for that.
So some of my content has been outsourced, and it is going great.
My site design template was outsourced, well kind of, I simply went over to templatemonster and picked one that I thought would work well.
My first landing page was outsourced, now I don`t really think that it is the greatest, but that is more my fault with direction than that of the designer, and the price was very ~affordable~.
However I needed to get my Wordpress theme developed to match the template that I picked out. So I headed over to DP and made a post. I got a few great offers, too good to be true actually, so I dumped them. I got some over the top and dumped them too. Then I picked one that seemed great. The guy wrote with decent English and wrote respectfully, and the price was mid-range.
However, I would not be writing this post if all went well. This was supposed to be a job that took no more than a week, it has been more like three, and the guy doesn`t seem to be that interested in getting back to me in a timely manner. I am starting to think that he has gotten his 50% upfront so now he doesn`t care. I pay my bills but I am seriously thinking that I need to have a discount on part of the service that I am receiving.
What have you done when your out sourcing project has gone wrong? When the person on the other end of the inter-web does`t give to shits that you have a schedule to meet and knows that they will never meet you face-to-face?
About Jeff
That’s why I never pay upfront.
And I work with people I can trust.
Many people say not to have biz with friends cause it can mess up. But if it mess up, You know how “good” friends they were and I just dump such people.
Yeah Man I feel you on this one. DigitalPoint can be a really sketchy place some times. That is why I have decided that I am no longer paying lump sums to people with offers. The most I will ever do is a month-to-month payment if it is subscription based.
I hope it works out for you. You could try to contest it through PayPal if that is how you paid.
I keep on outsourcing work every now and then, and I concur; outsourcing can sometimes be more frustrating than doing it yourself!
I have a website that is still being made since June (it’s November now), but that is probably an extreme. On the other hand, I have also been pleasantly surprised with quality a lot of times (never surprised by projects being before time though!)
Project management skills are very important on your part, and so is keeping up the tempo of the project. If the other person begins to feel that this is a project which can slide, it will slide.
Lastly, the carrot of “future projects after this are already in queue” works for me most of the time.
I am now working on a plan for a couple of longer term projects that I think that I will have to learn more management to pull off correctly.
That said I haven’t outsourced anything but some article writing for a while now, and really have to get better at working on it. Especially the management of contacts and who is who, since I will rarely see them face-to-face.