“Outsource” vs. “in-house”: a framework
So far we’ve discussed a few separate components of ongoing maintenance for CiviCRM:
Hosting and infrastructure; Security updates; and Non-security updates.
One reasons we’re even examining these topics is to help uncover the best way to get each of them addressed — should you outsource it to a specialist, or to a generalist, or assign it to one of your in-house team, or even do it yourself?
And you might have noticed a pattern here, which I’ll point out just in case you didn’t:
There are a few criteria by which you can evaluate any task to decide if it’s a good candidate for outsourcing:
Technical: Is it highly technical — whatever that might mean to you? For example, does it require writing custom code or using special tools other than the CRM or CMS browser interface.
Generic: Is it the kind of thing that’s done essentially the same for all CiviCRM sites?
Explainable: Is it easily explained to someone outside your organization?
Inscrutable: After it’s done, is it unlikely you’ll care about how its done?
The more you answer “Yes” to those questions, the more you should probably consider outsourcing it.
Consider the topics we’ve touched on so far. We can rate them on a 1-5 scale for each criteria, and count up the total rating:
| Technical | Generic | Explainable | Inscrutable | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting and infrastructure | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 20 |
| Security updates | 1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 17 |
| Non-security updates | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 12 |
You can see that our Total column is a pretty good indicator of whether I’m likely to recommend outsourcing or keeping it in-house:
The higher the Total value, the more likely it’s a candidate for outsourcing.
Homework:
So what about tomorrow’s topic: system configuration work?
This includes things like creating and managing users and permissions; configuring events, memberships, and contribution pages in CiviCRM; and other point-and-click configuration you can do in the browser.
How would you score that kind of work on the 4 criteria above?
We’ll dig on it a little more tomorrow.
All the best,
A.