Three steps to detect that your outsourcing partner is cheating you

You spend a few months choosing the best vendor that promises to deliver you the best-quality product. You discuss your business goals, deadlines the tasks, and the milestones. But something goes wrong and you think that this is not the right way. You may have a much longer term for completing the tasks or the budget seems to blow up.

We’ve picked up three steps that will help you detect cheaters and prevent any harmful cooperation in the future.

1. You don’t see their faces

It may seem weird but you may work with a few dozens of different people that tell you one and the same name. If the developer’s salary is too low in the outsourcing company you work with, you may face this situation. And if you have different people coding the project, you may have a lot of bugs and code inconsistency as a result.

You should make sure you work with one and the same person. You can make video calls to keep in touch with the team or you can organize personal meetings. It depends on the distance between you and the outsourcing vendor.

2. False reviews

Reading the reviews is not enough. It’s good to check them. And the best way to do this is contacting people that have left the reviews. You may find them in social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook. You may find them on various thematic websites like GitHub. You may read the reviews about the top outsourcing vendors in a specific location and check if your vendor is on the list.

If you cannot find those people, there’s a high risk that your vendor has no experience in providing development services. It doesn’t mean that they will deliver a low-quality product but there’s a high risk of this fact. You may also the fact the case when they cannot calculate the number of hours required for completing the tasks.

3. Procrastination

You may ask a few questions about how the staff is fighting procrastination and how they improve the productivity of their work. There should be good solutions for this problem as you cannot stand by the person and check their work every second. You cannot even take a look at the workflow of the team once or twice a day.

What’s the way out? It’s good to get a clear answer to how the team solves the problem The next step will be defining the tools for monitoring the work of a team. You can make screenshots but we consider this way to be not very efficient. You may find a third-party auditor or hire a project manager that will rule the work.

The bottom line

There are a million ways to cheat. If you are sure for 100% that you should outsource any of the tasks or even the whole project, it’s better to double-check the vendor’s reliability. But it’s also good to monitor the process and never let anyone cheat you.