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It really pains me to have to discontinue working with Keith and his team because in theory their setup seems ideal and some of the staff there really were exceptional.
The feedback I'm giving here though is just based on my experience with Keith alone and does not reflect upon his team who, on the whole, did an excellent job.
Keith's role is that he manages a team of in-house Filipino staff. He is a native English speaker (from the UK) and he was the person I first spoke with when we needed work outsourced. Keith is very pleasant, he is mild-mannered and seems to have good relations with his core employees. When commencing work with Keith we felt assured that in dealing with a native English speaker he would handle the communications with his staff.
In reality though it was usually Keith who lagged behind when things were being explained to him. He often needed computer assistance from his staff and after voice chats and messenger chats I often felt that Keith really hadn't understood much of the conversation yet his Filipino staff clearly had. I felt a bit condescending at times in asking Keith to rephrase the work I'd given to him in his own words so that I could be sure he'd understood but it was certainly necessary.
The first assignment was a very challenging one. I was training up his team to handle customer-service questions for a business that changes significantly after training had begun. This work went very well but, in hindsight, this was because Keith was not involved and I worked directly with his team. We hoped he would get more involved with managing the staff directly but his staff seemed much sharper than him when dealing with feedback that he was not needed.
The second job however was a real shambles. The work was extremely straightforward, merely copying and pasting a product catalog from an excel spreadsheet into a web form. I'd prepared a very comprehensive and clear step-by-step instruction document that detailed every step necessary. I was heading overseas for a week and felt it would be best to give this work to Keith so that he could allocate staff accordingly.
It took an hour on Skype to basically talk Keith through these instructions. I read the document verbatim to him and he agreed that he understood. There were two instructions not spelt out explicitly in the document ...
1) Some products had existing data entered. It needed removing.
2) Staff should add an extra column at the end of the excel sheet to detail which data had been entered and to note if any problems arose with any products.
All Keith had to do was to remember these two instructions and to communicate them to his staff. I left the work in his hands.
Whilst overseas I checked his staffs work and found that the instructions had not been carried out at all. Keith agreed to take full responsibility for his staff, to check their work and, should the work not be done to standard would personally do the work himself. I asked him to again repeat back to me the two instructions above that I considered most important and, again after a tiring skype chat he finally showed he understood what was required.
In short, those two simple requests that had taken over 90 minutes to communicate to Keith (and that he's repeated back to me) were completely ignored. A week later the job is still incomplete and full of errors. I now know as a fact that it'll be easier doing the work myself than wasting any more time overseeing Keith's work.
Keith has agreed that this work was of poor quality but cannot understand how this was his responsibility. This is not the attributes we need in a team manager unfortunately. Simply looking over his employees shoulders would have been enough to recognize they'd made mistakes and yet he has the audacity to blame our instructions and on his staff. I am embarrassed for him that this work proved too difficult to handle.
