As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been experimenting with the outsourcing of various tasks.  I’ve used overseas resources for projects in the past but decided it was time to sign up for one of the services and try it out for myself.  So in my first test, I tried Ask Sunday for my personal tasks.  I’ve used them for several tasks and been very happy with the results.  Today, I had them order my dinner (Indian food!) and it all worked out really well.  I will keep using them because it’s just too easy and the fact that they are around 24/7 is priceless.

My second experiment was for a more technical virtual assistant who would do more in-depth tasks.  Ask Sunday is for tasks less than 20 minutes, so I needed longer term backup.  I did lots of research but settled upon a test with BPOVIA.  My other options were AskFriday (who I hear is less than reliable these days), Brickwork India, TasksEveryday and OutSorcerer.  In doing all of this research I found that almost every blog entry had comments by “James” who worked for BPOVIA.  Seeing how he was able to do such a great grassroots marketing campaign for this company, I figured I’d give them a try.

BPOVIA is in China – the only outsourcing firm I saw there.  This has me a bit uneasy, but I figured I’d go ahead with this test because the cost of entry was low and it was fully automated.  I signed up early in the morning and by that night they had sent me access to their BaseCamp program and assigned me with a VA named Marissa.  So, eager to test I assigned them 2 quick tasks:

1) Install Wordpress on xxx domain.  Here are the mysql credentials:  xxxx…

2) Go to npgroup.net, take my jpg logo and recreate it as a Photoshop PSD that I can resize as I need to.

I was already excited.  I was watching “The Office” and 7000 miles away I had my people taking care of business.  Within 30 minutes I had task 2 completed.  Here was Marissa’s feedback:

Dear Peter,

I upload two files to basecamp, one is a PSD file and the other is a JPG file. The JPG file is of high resolution and it can be printed on A4 paper directly. The PSD file is 300 dpi and it can be used for printing.

If you have any question, please feel free to let me know :)

Best regards,
Marissa

Wow!  And then, about an hour later, I got the “Welcome to Wordpress” message.  it was installed.  Total time for both tasks: 2 hours.  At this rate, it was 20 bucks and two less things to worry about.

Now, so far it seems quite positive.  But I did have another project.  I submitted a quick task to adjust a webpage mockup.  I wanted to test their design skills.  I was less than impressed with how this project turned out.  I had given top-level instructions and it was misinterpreted.  I lost 3 hours on that one.

So – in the end – its been mixed but I’m optimistic.  My next tasks will be well defined, black and white things that I want to get done but will take me too much time, like moving a website from one server to another.