One of our recent clients at E.Webscapes, Chris Cairns from SmartLife, recently wrote about his experience with outsourcing and documented his decision making process regarding who to outsource with. In his post, Automatically Make Money Online Through Monetized Blogging: A Guide To Outsourcing Your Professional Blog’s Design (Plus: Actual Statement Of Work For Your Reuse), Chris takes you through his entire SOW (Statement of Work) and the ratings system he used to narrow down which design company he ended up using for his WordPress design and development project.
Obviously, I stated that he is a client of ours – that means that his entire decision making process from start to finish lead him to his, ultimate, decision of E.Webscapes as his company of choice for the completion of his project.
In his post he says:
To make the final selection, I issued the SOW and then came up with weighted evaluation criteria against which I’d rate each service provider’s proposal on a scale of 1 to 5: Cost (20%), Meets Requirements (25%), Past Performance (30%), Customer Service (15%), and Time-to-Completion (10%). When I finally received all the proposals, I conducted the evaluation…
You’ll have to click through to read the results and how my team at E.Webscapes compared to other design companies that Chris was looking at.
I have to give a shout out to Dino Latoga – - Dino was the designer of record for this project and handled Chris’ entire project from A to Z (and beyond) with professionalism and efficiency that I have come to greatly admire in all of his projects. Thanks, Dino.
Also, Lindsey Hardegree – - Lindsey is our Assistant Project Manager at E.Webscapes and she does a fantastic job with handling our pre-sales customer service and project management – - keeping us all on task and more organized than we would be without her around! She is my right hand and more obsessive compulsive and time management oriented than I could ever dream to be… but aspire to be. That’s why we have her, and part of why I love working with her so much!
Chris’ post about outsourcing and developing an organized and well thought-out SOW (Statement of Work) is really an excellent post to read if you’re looking to outsource any piece of your blog development and/or design to a third party provider of such services. It really helps with communication and laying down expectations and guidelines for the project from the get-go and helps to eliminate miscommunications in the long run.
Many thanks, Chris, for choosing E.Webscapes, and for an excellent post that really serves as a great resource tool for anyone looking to map out such a project and advice on outsourcing work to experts in the field!
Good luck with it.
10:02 pm on July 3rd, 2008
Lisa, again, appreciate all the work you and your team put in. You made the design a seamless, painless, and ENJOYABLE experience. How do you know when you’ve received top-notch service? When you feel like you haven’t paid nearly enough for the quality of the work! You’ve obviously assembled quite a pool of talent, which is a testimony to your management skill.
Chris
10:06 pm on July 3rd, 2008
Awww, thanks! I take the comments about my OCD-ness as a compliment
!
10:07 pm on July 3rd, 2008
Chris – thanks, again, for a very well documented post on your experience that also turns out to be a really great resource for advice for anyone looking for help in managing a project such as yours.
I’m thrilled we could help you see your project through to fruition – best of luck with it.. I suspect yours will be highly successful!
Happy 4th!
10:08 pm on July 3rd, 2008
@Lindsey – as you should, darlin’ – - you absolutely should!
12:35 am on July 4th, 2008
I’m now reading your post in an iPhone optimized format and I <3 it.
1:19 am on July 4th, 2008
Phenomenal, Zak – thank you for letting me know it’s working correctly. Not having an iPhone, myself – I have no way of checking that
2:26 am on July 4th, 2008
I don’t have a screen capture sw, otherwise I’d have sent you a screen shot, it worth to be seen. After july 11th, I’ll check for the availability of this kind of sw from Apple app store.