- 01
The situation
The practice was turning away compliance work because it could not hire fast enough at home. Two previous offshore arrangements had failed: work came back needing rework, no one owned the file, and the practice spent as long reviewing as it would have spent doing the work itself. The partners were sceptical that outsourcing could work at all.
- 02
What we found
The failures were structural, not about capability. Work had been sent as isolated tasks with no context, to a rotating pool with no named owner, without documented standards for what finished work looked like. Review time was high because the reviewer had to reconstruct what had been done and why. Nothing was wrong with the offshore staff; nothing had been set up for them to succeed.
- 03
What we did
We set up a defined delivery arrangement: a named contact who owns the relationship, documented working standards agreed with the practice, a fixed monthly timetable with clear handover points, and working papers prepared to the practice's own review standard rather than a generic one. Work is performed inside the practice's systems, under their data controls. Queries are raised in one batch on a set day rather than in a stream of messages. Nothing is returned until it has been reviewed on our side first.
- 04
What changed
The practice has predictable capacity, and review time on delivered work fell substantially because files arrive complete and documented.
The lesson
Offshore delivery fails for process reasons, not capability reasons. Named ownership, documented standards and internal review before handover are what separate a working arrangement from a cheap one.
