Some companies have very bad outsourcing experiences. There are high-profile horror stories that are often touted in the news which scare smaller companies from venturing into outsourcing. Outsourcing is a growing trend and becomming safer and more sofisticated every year. However there are still some pitfalls of outsourcing that must be avoided.

Regardless of whether or not you decide to do business with Overpass, please read the following list and remember them when you work with your outsourcing partner.

• Outsourcing is about expansion, not reduction.

Developing an offshore presence is one of best ways to increase the productivity and service of your company. It's a terrible way to reduce it. It's very tempting to think you can cut your local staff in half, or get rid of them all together and have all of your processes carried out offshore. The reality is that you still need local expertise to liaise with offshore expertise.

For example, you can offshore the majority of your HR processing, but you still need local faces who can interface between your company and their offshore counterparts.

Sending work offshore is a terrific growth opportunity for your existing staff. Coders can become architects. Call centre operators can become Customer Service Representatives.

• Don't offshore core competencies.

If you are known for your fantastic call centres, keep your call centres. If you are known for quality code, keep your star coders.

• Don't send your private data without being sure it will be protected.

Don't send your customer database unless you have a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement. The last thing you want is your customer list to be sold over the internet for a higher profit than they are making from you.

If your service provider is building a super cool web-database application, give them test data to use.

The Overpass policy states that we never send live data offshore.

• Don't believe the myth that you have to lower your standards.

If you get shoddy work, don't assume it's because you went to an offshore firm. All of the service providers in the Overpass Network are perfectionists. They want to know if you are not 100% satisfied with their work.

You should expect a higher level of quality from an offshore outsourcing firm than from a local one.

• Stay in routine communication.

In case you haven't been paying attention, there is a telecoms boom on at the moment. It has never been cheaper to communicate internationally. You can always use email, sure, but you also have video conferencing and voice-over-ip (VoIP) solutions.

Setting up a videoconference between two parties is very simple. You can use a client like MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger (the two most popular, but there are others) and webcam with microphone and have daily conversations free over the internet.

If you really want to use a conventional phone, there are several voice-over-ip providers that can connect you to the other side of the world for just pennies a minute. You dial their switchboard and they connect you to your party over a secure internet connection.

The only real problem you have with staying daily contact is negotiating the time zones.

Stay in daily or weekly contact. There is nothing worse than waiting for your go live date to find out that you have a completely different application than you were expecting.

Overpass uses Skype and Gotomeeting along with our collaboration system to perform routine code reviews and meetings.

• There will be bumps in the road, but those happen everywhere.

Whenever you outsource a project or a piece of work, there is a potential for things not to work out perfectly the first time. Expect that. This would happen if you send your work offshore, down the road, or to the fifth floor.

Don't get fidgety and pull your offshore project before the teething problems subside. You would only have to force yourself to find another partner later on.

If you work through Overpass, we will smooth all of these problems.

• Be honest with your employees.

You want to turn your company against you, close the door to your office everytime you talk about outsourcing. There is nothing that will make an offshore project fail faster than having your own people against it. If you keep them out of the dialogue, they will question their future with you.

Get them involved. Get their input. Put them in charge. Reassure them that you are growing, not shrinking.

• Don't pretend that you are not outsourcing.

This is probably the biggest complaint we get here about outsourcing. Customers don't particularly like to discuss their local weather or favourite television shows with people on the other side of the world.

No one wants to think they are being duped. Don't make your call centre or developers overseas pretend they are local. It's insulting to customers, staff, and the outsourcing industry.