The commonest reason an offshore team disappoints is that nobody wrote down what it was for. The second commonest is that the work sent offshore was the work nobody onshore could describe.
The test that decides it
Can you write the task down in enough detail that a competent stranger could do it, and can you tell afterwards whether they did it correctly?
Both halves matter. A task that can be described but not checked produces work of unknown quality. A task that can be checked but not described produces a person waiting to be told what to do, in a different time zone, at a cost.
What passes the test
Reconciliation. Data entry and validation. First-line support against a documented set of answers. Appointment setting against a script. Production work in a defined format: images to a spec, pages to a template, video to a house style. Research against stated criteria.
What these share is a definition of done that somebody other than the person doing it can apply.
What fails it
Anything requiring judgement about your business that you have never had to articulate. Work whose quality is only visible to a customer. Anything where the requirement changes weekly and is communicated by somebody walking over to a desk.
None of that is a statement about the ability of offshore staff. It is a statement about what survives the loss of physical proximity, and it would apply equally to a new employee in another building.
The thing people get backwards
Businesses frequently send the work they dislike rather than the work that transfers. Those are different sets and the overlap is smaller than it feels.
The work you dislike is often the work that requires the most context and the fastest judgement, which is precisely what does not survive a handover. The work that transfers well is often the work you had stopped noticing.
Volume, which decides whether any of this matters
A full-time person needs about forty hours a week of work that passes the test. Not forty hours of tasks you would like off your plate: forty hours of describable, checkable work.
Most businesses reaching for outsourcing for the first time have between ten and twenty. That is a real finding rather than a sales objection, and the honest answers to it are to combine roles, to wait, or to use part-time arrangements where they are available.
Filling a role with a person who has fifteen hours of real work is the fastest way to conclude that offshoring does not work.
The exercise worth doing first
For two weeks, log what you and your team actually do, in half-hour blocks, with a note of whether each block was describable and checkable.
It is tedious and it takes about twenty minutes a day, and it answers the volume question, the role definition question and the priority question at once. Nearly every business that does it is surprised by the result in the same direction.
The decision this leads to
Not whether to outsource. Which specific hours to move, in what order, and what has to be written down first.
A business that can answer those three has a good chance. One that cannot is buying a person and hoping, and the entries in this part of the journal are about the difference.
The four costs usually left out
Your own time. Someone onshore spends real hours briefing, reviewing and answering questions, heavily in the first month and permanently thereafter. Budget a day a week for the first month and half a day a week after that, and if nobody has that time the engagement is already in trouble.
Writing things down. The procedures that exist in somebody's head have to be written before they can be handed over. That work is valuable in itself and it is a cost, and it lands before any benefit does.
The overlap. Aligning hours to your business day means somebody starts early or finishes late, and where that person is your side of the arrangement it has a cost you would not otherwise carry.
Turnover. People leave, replacements need onboarding, and the second onboarding is cheaper than the first only if the first produced documentation.
What the arithmetic looks like honestly
A saving that survives all four is still substantial for the right role, which is why the industry exists. A saving calculated from hourly rates alone is not a saving; it is a rate comparison.
The entry on the real cost sets out a model with all four in it, and the model is deliberately unflattering, because a business that goes in on the unflattering version does not get a surprise in month three.
Two questions before any of this
Is the work steady, or does it arrive in bursts? Bursts suit contractors and suit a full-time hire badly, wherever that hire sits.
And would you hire somebody locally for this if the cost were the same? If the answer is no, the role probably does not exist and cost was doing the work of a business case.
The order to move things in
Start with the most describable work rather than the most annoying. The first role is a test of your own handover process as much as of anybody's ability, and testing it on something well defined tells you whether the process works.
Once one role is running and documented, the second is markedly easier, because the documentation habit exists and somebody on your side now knows what a good brief looks like.
What success looks like at three months
The person is working from written procedures they have improved themselves. Questions have dropped to a handful a week. You have stopped reviewing everything and are sampling. And somebody on your side has time back that they are using for something else.
If at three months you are still reviewing everything, the problem is almost always the brief rather than the person, and the entry on documentation is the place to start.