8 Reasons Why Outsourcing Custom Content Development Helps Every Business

Why Outsourcing Custom Content Development Helps Every Business

Today, outsourcing is a strategic necessity, often needed to remain competitive and control costs. Many of you reading this article may be evaluating outsourcing custom content development for the first time. You may want to outsource a single project/a series of projects or look at establishing a strategic partnership. It is important to begin this with quantification of your need to outsource.

What Are The Triggers For Outsourcing Custom Or Bespoke Content Development?

The use of eLearning/online training in general and eLearning content development outsourcing has seen a surge in the last decade and a half or so. Consider these stats and facts and how they are leading to outsourcing of custom content development:

• More than 77% of the companies in the US use online training.
• The market has seen a whopping growth of about 900% from the year 2000.
• If an organization is to invest on an eLearning content development project of about US $10K-50K in the US, it costs nearly 40% less in India.
• According to a study from the EDUCAUSE Centre for Applied Research, among research institutions, eLearning was the most favored (60%) for outsourcing.
• Most organizations do not have a training department of their own. They find it way cheaper and convenient to outsource their training needs than have a dedicated internal team for the same.
• Many organizations carry out occasional trainings and opting for outsourcing is a flexible option for them in terms of training investment.
• Multilingual customer support is crucial for several reasons, which collectively enhance a company's ability to serve its customers effectively and improve overall business outcomes.

Here are the typical triggers that lead to outsourcing of custom or bespoke content development.

If you are an eLearning company (offering custom or bespoke content development services), you would be looking to outsource primarily to:

1. Gain scalability to address higher volumes of work.
2. Cut down on the delivery and marketing time.
3. Cut down on costs.
4. Fill the talent gaps that you may have internally by accessing talent from outside.
5. Enrich your portfolio with more innovative solutions.

On the other hand, if you are part of a Learning and Development team and manage the training and its delivery through internal resources, your typical triggers would be:

1. To bring down costs.
2. Leverage on external talent and make up for the lack of talent that you may have.
3. Enrich your portfolio with innovative solutions.
4. Clear your bandwidth to retain focus on your strategic services (including engagement with internal teams, TNA, Learning Analytics, ROI, and so on)

What Are The Reasons Why Outsourcing Custom Content Development Helps Every Business?

We, at EI Design are a strategic outsourcing partner to several organizations world-wide. Several of these engagements began with a small project to test waters and have steadily evolved to a point where we are engaged over multi-year contracts for these customers.

The journey to establish successful partnerships in custom or bespoke content development has intrinsic challenges. I believe that the challenges intrinsic to outsourcing of custom or bespoke content development can be offset by using the right framework to evaluate the partner. Once this is in place, you will see the required gains and achieve the long-term goal of competitive advantage.

Here is my list of 8 reasons why outsourcing custom or bespoke content development helps every business:

1. Reduction In Costs. One of the most obvious benefits of outsourcing is the amount of money organizations end up saving. Why spend a packet on eLearning content development in-house when you can get it done in lesser time and with the desired quality for a much lesser price? There’s no need to worry about infrastructure, hardware, and software costs either!
2. Flexibility To Scale The Team Up And Down. Changing business dynamics can create situations where you’d need to alter the size of your team. Outsourcing addresses this challenge effectively, offering you the flexibility to get more (or less) people to get the job done.
3. Access To New Skill Sets And More Varied Talent In A Given Domain. Learner expectations keep changing and so do tools and technologies. With the industry being so fast-paced and dynamic, it sometimes becomes difficult to have all the skills required to address the varied and changing needs of your customers. With outsourcing, you get the comfort of being able to count on another partner to help you address this challenge.
4. Reduction In Development Time Leading To A Faster Turnaround Time. Outsourcing partners typically focus on shorter development cycles and align a dedicated team to fulfill your requirements. This translates into a quicker turnaround time, especially when your internal team is unavailable.
5. Access To Best Practices Leading To Optimization Of Your Development Practices. There’s always that opportunity to take a leaf out of someone’s book. Your outsourcing partner is likely to have serviced several organizations and follow sound development practices as a result. You can leverage on this and optimize your own development practices.
6. Addition Of More Innovative Solutions To Your Portfolio. When you get to work with an outsourcing partner, you often get access to the wider range of solutions they offer. That’s an opportunity window to enrich your own portfolio by taking cues from their offerings.
7. Enhanced Focus On Your Customers. With a dedicated outsourcing partner taking care of your development needs and day to day execution, you can pay more attention to your customers (internal or external) and divert the time and focus on achieving customer satisfaction and opening new windows of business opportunity.
8. Channelize Your Resources To Strategic Activities. Letting your outsourcing partner handle certain portions of your tasks will allow your team to channelize themselves more towards the strategic side of your business.

To gain further insights on outsourcing, you can review two of my articles:

• Is Outsourcing eLearning Content Development Right for You?
• A Step-By-Step Outsourcing Guide For eLearning Content Development

You can also download my eBooks to determine if outsourcing is right for you and how you can select the right partner:

• Is Outsourcing of eLearning Content Development Right For You
• How To Evaluate The Right Partner To Outsource Your eLearning Content Development

I hope this article will help you in moving forward to outsource your custom or bespoke content development and use this approach to further strengthen your competitive advantage. If you need any specific assistance in this regard, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net.