Successful Outsourcing of Administrative Support Projects

Virtual assistants are everywhere. People who need administrative and secretarial workers no longer have to hire them full time and provide medical and insurance benefits. There are no contracts to sign; when they perform poorly, you just terminate them without worrying about lawsuits.

Today's virtual assistants are bright, talented multi-taskers and can be relied on to take over the admin functions of your business so you can devote your time to selling, marketing or doing the books.

A virtual assistant can help you:

* Keep things organized (set up your daily and weekly tasks and send you reminders)
* Contact your clients and do post-sale follow-ups
* Conduct research
* Perform data entry
* Send e-mail marketing documents / autoresponders
* Do research
* Write copy

Some admin assistants work on an hourly fee, some prefer to be paid on a per project basis. Rates are always negotiable.

A good virtual assistant can be of tremendous help; good ones are hard to find. When you've found the right candidate, try to stay with the same assistant for your future projects. This will save you time explaining what your business is all about, how you want to run your day, training on whatever software or forms you use on a repetitive basis.

Some outsourcers need an all-around admin assistant while others need an assistant to perform one task.

In you want an all around person, word your job description carefully, enumerating all the tasks you want done. If you want your assistant to focus on one task, explain it in detail so there is no misunderstanding. Communicate often. The idea is to simulate an office environment where your assistant is sitting just outside your office and with whom you can communicate throughout the day. Use these examples (for one task) and tweek them to your requirements.

If your virtual assistant does not communicate regularly, that's a red flag!

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Overall Plan:
We run a translation services company and need an assistant to perform data entry. You don't need to know any foreign language but we do want someone who has a perfect command of the English language. The candidate must also be familiar with basic Excel functions because the data will be inputted mostly on Excel.

Nature of Project:
We're building a translation memory database of technical terms. This translation memory is essential to ensure uniformity of terminology for our clients. Our in-house translators normally do this as part of their job but the last 30 days have been hectic and we're now dealing with a backlog of data that needs to be entered into our translation memory.

Compensation:
Fixed fee. Please bid on the basis of the enclosed job description which provides more details.

Details:
You will find the complete description of the task. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. While the job is repetitive, it can be a valuable (and even entertaining) experience for you as you will learn some words and phrases in the technical realm!

Thank you.

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The job description above is neither too short nor too long. This gives the freelancer an idea of your basic requirements. In most cases, this would suffice.

However, it often happens that the design of a particular project has to be revised a few times because something is missing. This is often because key data was not communicated properly. After you receive bids, you send out a detailed project spec (specification sheet) so your freelancer has more information to work with.

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The Task:
There are 24 language pair documents. Each document contains 10,000 words. The task is to copy and paste into an Excel sheet the technical terms and phrases that are highlighted in yellow. For example, the first language pair document is an English document that has been translated into Spanish. You therefore have two documents. You copy and paste the highlighted terms into a two column Excel sheet. The first column is for the English terms, the second column is for the Spanish terms. When you finish copying and pasting all the highlighted terms, you will save that Excel sheet using the title of the document preceded by the EN-SP prefixes. So the first document might be saved like this: EN-SP_aerospace contract_client40005_date.

You then take the second language pair document. It could be English to Polish or English to German and you do the same data entry function.

Don't worry. Each highlighted term in the original and translated documents are numbered, so you'll see something like this: E-10 in the original document and S-10 in the document translated into Spanish.

Your Excel document will look like this, taking the example of an English-Spanish document:

Code----English------------------------------Code----Spanish
E-10----Automatic direction finder----S-10-----Radiogoniómetro automático
E-11----Runway centre line-------------S-11-----Eje de pista

Additional Guidelines:
* When we say copy and paste, we really mean copy and paste. You cannot type any of the terms. This is to ensure that correct spelling with the proper foreign accents are maintained.
* Always check that your codes for both the source language and target language are the same. This is to ensure that the term has its corresponding correct translation.
* This type of task can create visual fatigue, so we recommend you take breaks every 30 minutes. The repetitive motions of reading two documents simultaneously and then copying and pasting them on another sheet are likely to cause eye strain.
* Double-check your work after each language pair document is completed.
* Based on our word count, the documents have 10,000 words each but the highlighted terms that you need to copy and paste into the Excel sheet are about 30% (hence 3,000 technical terms per document).

Submission of Files:
As and when a language pair document is completed, submit it. This will give us time to check for errors while you work on the second language pair document.

Time frame:
We estimate that each language pair document will take 7 days to complete. We are willing to extend that to 10 days, but you need to keep in regular contact with us.

Working Relationship:
We have worked with administrative assistants before who did not communicate with us regularly. It is important for us to know the status of projects that we outsource. We cannot serve our clients efficiently if our admin assistants are not providing the level of support we require. If you have problems keeping in touch regularly, please do not bid.

You have to confirm to us in writing that you will do this task yourself and will not outsource it to a third party. For this reason, we prefer to deal with individuals instead of with companies.

If our working relationship does not work out, we will terminate your services immediately and pay for the completed tasks.

To summarize, we consider it important that you:

* Copy and paste as instructed
* Follow the Excel format we have provided (no deviations whatsoever)
* Send us an email every 2-3 days to let us know of your progress
* Not ask anyone else to do this task for you

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So there is enough information in these examples to compare to your own project descriptions. It is purely up to you how you use this information but it will make a big difference to providers who view your project if they can see your needs presented in an ordered and comprehensive way.

Happy Outsourcing

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