1. Set Your Goals

Know your needs. What do you need to offshore? Do you need somebody to build you a website? To maintain your website? Do you need contact center agents? Programmers and graphic designers? How many of them do you think you need? How long should the project would take to finish? List all these questions down and more. Then answer them.

After doing so, you now should

2. Find The People That You Want To Work With

Finding the right partner for your project should not be made with haste. You should meticulously examine every offshoring firms that you shortlisted. Ask for a company profile, a proposal letter and a quotation from each one of them, if available, ask for sample works or portfolios that they produced. This way, you can decide which of the so many firms suited your taste the best and the most friendly in your pocket.

Check the compatibility of your onshore staff with your offshore staff. See to it that you check if the offshore staff and the onshore staff have the same wavelength. Be sure that they will enjoy working with each other. Ask your onshore staff about their opinions. Let them tell you what they think of hiring offshore staff. This will lessen the tension and the wrong impression that you are getting people from another part of the globe because you don't want them anymore. This will also serve as a window for you to explain to them the plan of the company to try offshoring projects because if the company will do so, all of them will benefit from the additional profit that the company could gain.

Now that you have the staff, you will need to

3. Hire A Project Manager

Project managers are very important if you are really serious with the project. They are the ones who check the milestones and the quality of work that the staff accomplishes everyday. Should you hire one, you should consider certain criteria:

They should be knowledgeable in their fields of expertise.

Has several years of professional experience.

Has proven themselves and received merits for jobs well done.

Now, you have to find you're mode of

4. Communication, Komunikasyon, Comunicación

Identify the channels to transfer knowledge. This is one of the most important things to consider when planning an offshore project. The fact that you will be working with people very far away from your place, you should be able to monitor them whenever you want, wherever you are. Skype, AIM, ICQ, & IM are some of the useful channels that you could use to transfer instructions and to be given reports at the same time.

After you have installed the software that you need in your precious Macbook, you have to

5. Check Risks

Ask your friends' and mentors' opinions and experiences about offshoring. This is the best way to check what are the do's and don't's. Ask for their mistakes and what did they do to solve it. In this way, you will avoid committing the same mistakes and have a better and systematic way to deal with stubborn risks.

Speaking of risks, if you really want to avoid those then you have to be sure that you have a

6. Budget Rundown

Of all the the steps of offshore project planning, you shouldn't jump at this one. And perhaps you wouldn't because the very fact that you are considering an offshore project is because you want to save money, right?

So take your time, sit down with your accountant and have her carefully jot down all the money matters and be sure to include a budget for an

7. Offshore Visit

For your peace of mind, see for yourself the working place of your staff-to-be. This is optional but recommended for first-timers. Remember that you are a stakeholder and you have to be sure that you see tangible facilities and personnels and not just a photoshoped pictures of the supposed-to-be expansion of your office offshore.

After you have recovered from your jet lag, it's about time to

8. Be SMART

I don't know who made this, but one thing is for sure – he/she is SMART to have founded this marvelous system that's being followed by most result-oriented and successful moguls.

S - Specific

M - Measurable

A - Attainable

R - Realistic

T - Time Bound

Now, you want to know how to be really, really, really SMART? You have to

9. Review Your Plan

Always review your plan. This is just like the golden rule of writing discipline - rewriting. Check if you missed something out, if there's a wrong approach to the plan and so on and so forth. Make a table in which you will write the milestones of your project. This will not really look as if it's necessary until you find yourself in the shoes of professional broadsheet writers that didn't rewrite – an unrepairable grammatical error printed in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post read and remembered by all, forever.

But it's not enough to just review it. Always and I mean ALWAYS

10. Be Ready For The Kitchen Sink Syndrome

So you think you are all set. Then you'll realize eventually that the offshore project is not what you have in mind. You have to change direction and resort to plan B. But you don't have plan B. Much worse, you don't have enough budget, resources and time in your hand. What do you do now?

This is what you called the Kitchen Sink Syndrome. We all experience this once (or more than) in our lives. Try doing thesis. On the defense day, you dressed to impress, you memorized your presentation and practice all the rebuttals to all the possible queries that could be thrown by the terror panelists. But then one by one the panelists ask you questions which are alien to your ears and you have no choice but to concede. Suddenly the Kitchen Sink Syndrome starts to sink in and you can't control it. You're doomed.

This would not have happened if you have plan B and C at hand. Now, list all possible predicaments you might encounter and make plans B and C. If you are finished doing all these then,

Congratulations! You are now all set. Good luck and happy offshoring!

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