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This may explain some of my outsourcing troubles
Just Out: New Book On Solving Health Care Crisis
How To Experience Abject Failure
Just Out: New Book On Solving Health Care Crisis
How To Experience Abject Failure
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
This may explain some of my outsourcing troubles
Although this woman speaks much better English than anyone I dealt with.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Categories: Business & Finance, Productivity
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Just Out: New Book On Solving Health Care Crisis
I just read about the new book, Solving America's Health Care Crisis by Dan Perrin and Pat Rooney, in the Downsize DC newsletter. Downsize DC is an organization with principles of downsizing government and personal responsibility that I support. So I went to Amazon to check out the reader reviews. The book is new - released May 2 - so there aren't a lot, but all eight of them are 5-star ratings.I'll be checking this out. Health care in the US clearly needs an overhaul, and Euro-style social medicine is equally clearly not a useful answer. Government never, ever, runs anything like health care (or education, welfare, or anything else) effectively, instead creating an ever-growing bureaucracy that produces less and less for more and more dollars. Hopefully Perrin and Rooney and provided a roadmap to a system that gets people the health care they need with the proper incentives to keep costs under control.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 6:54 PM
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Categories: Health, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 6:54 PM
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Monday, April 14, 2008
How To Experience Abject Failure
I know when I'm beat. I know how to cut my losses and get out. There's a lot to be said for perseverance, but even more for not throwing good money after bad. What am I talking about? My outsourcing attempts with GetFriday.com. My God, what a disaster.After 2 1/2 months I had exactly one - that's 1 - single success with GetFriday. Every other task I assigned was a miserable failure. Even after getting a replacement PA who was, supposedly, experienced in web search and basic web skills I could not get even marginally relevant results when I asked for search data on specific topics.
Worse, when it became clear to me that this wasn't going to work out it took nearly an act of Congress to get them to cancel my account. The entire affair was a disaster.
What I learned is simple - if this is the best the Eur-Asian nations can offer then we are in no danger of being overrun by a low-wage workforce. They demonstrated a lack of understanding, competence, response, and adaptability that was hard to comprehend.
I went so far as to start running my task descriptions by two of my colleagues to try and ensure I was being both clear and reasonable in my requests. The results I got were still stunningly inept.
In fairness, most of my colleagues asked the very basic question, "Well, what did you expect?" I don't know, maybe something a little above abject incompetence? How about someone with enough self awareness to recognize when they did not understand a task and ask for clarification until they did?
If you read my experience with BellSouth tech support from 2006 you'll see my GetFriday experience is neither my first encounter with such incompetence, nor is it any real surprise. I suspect the cultural and language barriers between a third-world workforce and US-based expectations are just too great to overcome. Or maybe it is something else. I do not know.
What I do know is that from now on I will stick with North American (and possibly European) sources for anything I want done. Given my experiences I do not think there is any non-repetitive task requiring foresight, intuition, or judgment that can be effectively outsourced to a third-world workforce. It may well be that if you can 100% script an activity, and spend enough time to get the workforce to actually read the script, and have enough patience for them to practice and fail repeatedly until they get it right, that you might eventually have some success.
But as a small business my tasks are not repetitive. At least not now. And they do require thinking - which entails all those things mentioned above. The third-world is simply not the place to get these things done.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 2:15 PM
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Categories: Globalization, Productivity
Terry Frazier at 2:15 PM
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
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