We’ve developed expertise in methods of distributing work tasks and targeting information to relevant people in ways that were not previously practical to outsource. The creative use of new crowdsourcing tools has started the new wave of productivity increases. We can bring projects in quicker and at lower costs because of the vendor management skills we’ve developed in remote staffing. No, we’re not talking about sending your work to India, but we might send it to someplace like Iowa or split the tasks between 1000 people.
If you need to create a list, have Halligan Projects utilize Mechanical Turk instead of bringing in a temp or putting interns on it. You’ll get the results in a day rather than in 2 weeks at a fraction of the cost. (Approximately 75% of Mechanical Turk workers are American.) Companies building add-on services with Mechanical Turk are changing the nature of work distribution. Turk workers can be engaged directly, thought 3rd party services, or through APIs.
The contest or prize-based model is a way to get many creative people working on your problem. People are using 99design to crowdsource their graphics. Netflix just concluded a contest to improve their recommendation engine. InnoCentive and others are solving scientific problems through crowdsourcing. On top of getting great results, these tactics can make for great PR.
We’re also incorporating Elance and Guru workers in projects to do everything from translation to data entry. For work that doesn’t require face-to-face contact, having someone in Iowa perform work for you is much more affordable. Like eBay buyer/seller ratings, the reputation ratings of the freelancers on these sites remove most of the risk.
We plan to incorporate such practices into our larger engagements and pursue specific crowdsourcing work. It takes some creativity to incorporate these tactics and a leap of faith to start using them. We have both going for us. With the frequent changes in available technology tools, it takes too much time for any CTO, CIO, COO, marketing, or PR person to follow. Not keeping abreast of disruptive technologies can lead to your job or company’s getting disintermediated. Let Halligan Projects advise you on work distribution tactics or let us do it for you.
Throw a small task at us to let us show you what we can do.