Source: Feb 1, 2011 BloombergBusiness Week Special Report
Meet the MicroWorkforce
The remote resourcing of workers goes by many names: outsourcing, off-shoring, crowdsourcing, the human cloud, microwork. Outsourcing your workforce tasks and activities saves money and time. But the real news story is that the micro workforce business is big and growing over 8% per year.
The Bloomberg micro workforce article reviews the process of "using the Internet to find workers around the world for short-term projects that can pay a few bucks to hundreds of dollars per hour. The tasks might require a few minutes or a few days to complete. Benefits to companies include finding large numbers of workers to complete projects quickly, finding niche expertise, saving money, and making better use of in-house resources. It also lets Western workers, in places with a high cost of living, compete directly with those in developing markets. For many freelancers, microwork gives them unprecedented flexibility to work almost anywhere at any time."
The Special Report includes an interesting case study of how Pfizer structured an out-sourcing function for busy professionals, called PfizerWorks - an on-demand support program to farm out non-core tasks, such as data checking and market research to out-sourcing companies.
"Pfizer now lets [employees] punt those tedious and time-consuming tasks to India with the click of a button. PfizerWorks, launched early last year, permits some 4,000 employees to pass off parts of their job to outsiders. You might call it personal outsourcing. With workers in India handling everything from basic market research projects to presentations, professionals can focus on higher-value work. "
Now that's awesome. As a project management professional, I know that the key to high-level productivity is to delegate and schedule well defined tasks so that the PM can complete targeted milestones quickly and efficiently. What a great business model. Many of these sites specialize in sourcing highly technical subject mater experts, testers, consultants, and thought leaders to assist and support your company's need to ramp up and down in a project as required by the life cycle of a project or product.
Meet the MicroWorkforce
The remote resourcing of workers goes by many names: outsourcing, off-shoring, crowdsourcing, the human cloud, microwork. Outsourcing your workforce tasks and activities saves money and time. But the real news story is that the micro workforce business is big and growing over 8% per year.
The Bloomberg micro workforce article reviews the process of "using the Internet to find workers around the world for short-term projects that can pay a few bucks to hundreds of dollars per hour. The tasks might require a few minutes or a few days to complete. Benefits to companies include finding large numbers of workers to complete projects quickly, finding niche expertise, saving money, and making better use of in-house resources. It also lets Western workers, in places with a high cost of living, compete directly with those in developing markets. For many freelancers, microwork gives them unprecedented flexibility to work almost anywhere at any time."
The Special Report includes an interesting case study of how Pfizer structured an out-sourcing function for busy professionals, called PfizerWorks - an on-demand support program to farm out non-core tasks, such as data checking and market research to out-sourcing companies.
"Pfizer now lets [employees] punt those tedious and time-consuming tasks to India with the click of a button. PfizerWorks, launched early last year, permits some 4,000 employees to pass off parts of their job to outsiders. You might call it personal outsourcing. With workers in India handling everything from basic market research projects to presentations, professionals can focus on higher-value work. "
Now that's awesome. As a project management professional, I know that the key to high-level productivity is to delegate and schedule well defined tasks so that the PM can complete targeted milestones quickly and efficiently. What a great business model. Many of these sites specialize in sourcing highly technical subject mater experts, testers, consultants, and thought leaders to assist and support your company's need to ramp up and down in a project as required by the life cycle of a project or product.
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