Case Study — 7 Min Read
Outsourcing readiness – how to check if you are prepared to successfully outsource your digital marketing project.
Case Study — 7 Min Read
Outsourcing readiness – how to check if you are prepared to successfully outsource your digital marketing project.
Outsourcing has become a global trend, especially in an Digital world offering many benefits when working on digital marketing projects. To name just a few advantages over a traditional in-house model: since you do not have to maintain a workforce, it can vastly reduce project costs. Outsourcing is also the best solution for any project demanding a great degree of flexibility or specialists with a rare skill set. Furthermore, it also gives access to the technology and know-how typically not available to everyone.
However, one must be aware that not every company is fully prepared for the partnership with a third party – especially when it comes to its operational, organizational and financial capacities. To make sure you are up to the task, rate the level of your readiness with a Readiness Checklist and Outsourcing Readiness Assessment. They ensure you have a firm understanding of your needs and abilities which will, in turn, make it easier to choose the best service model for your project.
Readiness checklist
1. Key Objectives
Every preparation for a project needs to start with establishing main objectives. Do not limit yourself to answers such as increasing an overall performance or achieving predefined financial goals. Instead, try to dig deeper and think how outsourcing can contribute to the operational capacity of your organization.
2. Costs & Benefits
By applying sourcing analysis you will be able to get an answer if the entire project has any financial sense. There is always a possibility that costs would outweigh future benefits, as a result making the entire not worth the effort.
3. Risk Assessment
Any digital marketing campaign involves four types of risks: technical, project, process, and organizational. Thus, marketing project managers in order to face all of them have to have a Risk Management Plan in place, which allows them to identify and monitor any arising problems.
4. Dependencies
In general, this term in digital marketing includes copy strategy, SEM/SEO, social media, and people, and it refers to the situation when one element relies on another one. Trying to understand the complexity of every piece and identifying all dependencies before the project starts can prevent idleness of the project, as a result saving you a lot of time, money and resources.
5. Technical Assessment
Technical assessment should give you an answer if your company is ready for cooperation with a third-party provider. Check the state of your digital & marketing strategy, marketing applications portfolio contents, IT infrastructure and interior process that can possibly hinder the progress of the future project.
6. Governess assessment
By executing the governess assessment you can establish the state of your business, and project management maturity. As a result, you will be able to answer the question if your company is prepared in terms of capabilities needed to align with the proposed outsourcing service model and determine the gaps that may impact the performance of outsourcing.
7. Transition
During this phase, you will delegate all workload to the outsourcing company. What is of much more importance is making sure you have resources at your disposal and a plan on how to manage the transition.
8. Communications
As many studies show, the main reasons that lead to the failure of outsourcing projects are problems with communication. That is why you need to have an efficient communication strategy in place right away. Check if your communication channels (knowledge management or project management) enable cooperation by allowing a seamless flow of information across all departments, stakeholders, contractors and all third parties involved. Do not underestimate the importance of face-to-face meetings.
To Sum Up
As you may already know cooperating with an external service provider offers many benefits. Yet, to make the cooperation seamless and fruitful for both parties one must answer the questions from the Readiness Checklist = Why? Because it ensures you have a firm understanding of your current capacities, making it easy to choose a service model of cooperation which will eventually allow you to achieve all planned business objectives.
