Outsourcing Maturity Audit: The 20 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Outsourcing a First Function to Madagascar

A dedicated team member in Madagascar reproduces what you transmit to them. If what you transmit exists only in your assistant's head or in oral habits that have never been formalised, they will reproduce nothing at all. These first four questions assess the real transferability of your processes.

Not a 200-page manual. A document, even a rough one, that describes the steps, exceptions and validation criteria. If the answer is "no, but I can explain verbally", you have a problem. Verbal instructions don't scale. They distort with every transmission. They disappear when you're in a client meeting. Test it: ask a colleague to carry out the task without speaking to you, using only what is written down. If they get stuck within 10 minutes, your documentation is insufficient. This is not a shameful flaw. 80% of SMEs with fewer than 20 employees operate without written processes. But it is a prerequisite that must be fixed before launching anything offshore. Allow one to two weeks to document a simple function (order management, accounting data entry, level 1 support). If you outsource without this step, your team member in Madagascar will spend their first three weeks guessing what you expect. And you will spend yours correcting their mistakes.

Outsourcing works when you break a function down into autonomous blocks. Following up on unanswered quotes: an isolatable block. Managing the entire commercial relationship from A to Z with constant improvisation: not isolatable. A concrete question: list your tasks from last week. How many could be carried out by someone who doesn't know your clients by their first name? If the answer is "fewer than five hours per week", outsourcing a full-time position makes no sense today. You may need a freelancer for specific tasks, not a dedicated team member. If the answer exceeds twenty hours per week, you have enough volume for a full-time position. That is the minimum threshold to justify an offshore FTE. Between five and twenty hours, the question becomes: can you group several micro-functions together to reach the required volume? Orchestrer dev, support, compta et admin depuis un prestataire unique is a documented option if you find yourself in this situation.

Question 3: when a case falls outside the standard process, what happens? If the answer is "we improvise" or "it depends on who's available", you are going to generate constant escalations back to yourself. An offshore team member needs a clear decision tree: case A, do X. Case B, do Y. Case C, call me. Without this, they will contact you ten times a day or make decisions you would never have approved. Document your five most frequent exceptions before starting. Not all of them. The five that account for 80% of non-standard situations. Question 4: how will you know the work has been done well? "I'll be able to tell" is not a KPI. Number of follow-ups completed, processing time, data entry error rate, tickets resolved on first response. If you have never measured the performance of this function internally, you will not be able to evaluate it externally. Defining three simple indicators before launch is enough. You can refine them later, once you have real data. As our article on la structuration du ramp-up offshore explains in detail, the KPIs of day 1 are not those of month 6.

Your future team member will work from Antananarivo, on premium equipment, with fibre and 5G. But if your side is not technically ready, the best infrastructure in the world will be of no use. These questions assess your ability to integrate someone into your digital environment.

Question 5: can your team member access everything they need with a browser and an internet connection? If your critical files are on a local server with no VPN, if your ERP only runs on an internal network, if your emails are on a desktop Outlook with no web access, you have a technical project to resolve before recruiting. This project takes between one day (migration to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365) and three weeks (opening a secure VPN to an on-premise ERP). Not a month of consulting. Concrete action. Question 6: how many different tools does your team use for a single function? If accounting data entry involves an Excel spreadsheet, a paper scan, an email to the accountant and a follow-up phone call, your offshore team member will spend more time navigating between tools than actually producing work. The ideal: one main tool per function. In reality: rarely more than three. Beyond that, rationalise before outsourcing. Le stack minimal pour piloter une équipe dédiée à Madagascar details exactly which tools to keep and which to eliminate.

Question 9: when you give an instruction, how do you do it? If the answer is "I shout from my desk" or "I pop my head into the open-plan office", outsourcing will force you to change. This is not a drawback. It is an improvement you should have made three years ago. Slack, Teams, or even a structured WhatsApp channel. The tool matters less than the reflex: writing instead of speaking. Because a team member in Madagascar will never pick up on instructions thrown out between two doors. Question 10: are you able to function without an immediate response for two hours? Madagascar is on the GMT+3 time zone. Depending on the season, the time difference with Paris is zero to two hours. In other words: almost non-existent. But the real question is not the time zone. It is your tolerance for asynchronous working. If you need a response within the minute, if you send three follow-up messages in ten minutes when an email goes unanswered, the problem is not Madagascar. It is your management style. Ask yourself honestly: do you have the patience to let someone work without interrupting them?

A dedicated team member is not an automaton. They are a person, on a permanent contract, working for you and you alone. They need a point of contact, feedback and direction. If no one in your company has the time or the skill for this role, the outsourcing will fail. Not through lack of talent. Through lack of management.

Question 11: who will be the direct point of contact for your offshore team member? One person. Not "the team". Not "we'll see depending on the topic". A name, a phone number, an email address. If no one raises their hand, you are not ready. Question 12: can this person dedicate 30 to 45 minutes per day to management during the first month? Not in formal meetings. In genuine availability to answer questions, validate the first deliverables and course-correct. After the ramp-up period, this time drops to 15 minutes daily and a weekly check-in. But the first month is critical. If your point of contact is already overwhelmed, they will miss the early warning signs and discover problems too late. Question 13: have you ever managed someone remotely? If so, you know the pitfalls. If not, piloter 2 à 4 collaborateurs à Madagascar sans DRH is a practical how-to guide. The skill can be learned. But it cannot be improvised on the first day.

Question 14: when you assign a task, how much detail do you provide? "Make me something clean" is not a brief. A brief contains: the objective, the expected deliverable, the format, the deadline and examples of what is and is not acceptable. If you have never written a formal brief in your life, practise before you start. Take a task you are delegating this week and write the instructions as if the recipient had never met you. If it holds together in three clear lines, you are ready. If it goes in all directions, work on the format. Question 15: do you accept that a deliverable will not be perfect on the first attempt? Iteration is normal. Toxic perfectionism that refuses every first draft kills motivation and velocity. Calibrate your expectations: right first time for simple tasks, a maximum of two iterations for complex ones. Question 16: can you formulate negative feedback without ambiguity and without aggression? "That's not it" says nothing. "The file format is incorrect, here is the template to follow, send me the corrected version before 2pm" says everything. The precision of your feedback determines the speed at which your team member develops their skills.

Question 17: does your team in France know that an offshore team member is joining the setup? If you keep it secret, expect passive resistance when the new person needs to interact with your employees. Announcing it in advance is not optional. Question 18: have you budgeted for at least six firm months? Outsourcing does not generate ROI in fifteen days. The first month is ramp-up. The second is stabilisation. The real cruising speed arrives in the third month. Cutting at two months because "it's not moving fast enough" is the surest way to turn an investment into a net loss. Question 19: do you have a clear vision of what you will do with the time freed up? If you outsource your accounting data entry to "have more time" without knowing what you will allocate that time to, you will have gained nothing. The freed-up time must be directed: prospecting, strategy, product development. Otherwise it simply dissolves. Question 20: if the outsourcing works, are you ready to scale? Going from one to three team members in six months is common once the model proves itself. If your organisation cannot absorb this growth, anticipate it now. La méthode pour scaler de 1 à 5 ETP en 90 jours sets out the framework.