Chapter 7

Making Use of Macrotasks

In This Chapter

Understanding macrotasking

Appreciating what’s great about macrotasking

Knowing which tasks can be macrotasks

Getting ready to macrotask

Finding a macrotasker for the job

Bringing the project to a close

Working through an example project

Welcome to the world of macrotasking – a new form of freelancing where you (as the crowdsourcer) go to the crowdmarket with a job that requires a specific skillset. You use the market to engage the crowd and find one person with the skills needed to do that job. Macrotasking is so similar to freelancing that a new term – elancing – has been coined to describe it.

As with all forms of crowdsourcing, macrotasking has led people to think about jobs in new ways. In the traditional model, organisations are supposed to be self-contained, possessing all the skills and talents they need among their employees and managers. If an organisation needs a specific skill to complete a task, it either needs to find that skill among its employees, hire a new employee or decide that it doesn’t need that skill. Macrotasking gives managers another option: to look for specific skills outside the organisation.

In this chapter, I help you come to grips with macrotasking so that you too can use it to your benefit.

Getting to Grips with Macrotasking

Macrotasking is the professional form of crowdsourcing. It uses the crowdmarket to match workers who operate as freelancers or independent contractors – and who have special skills or experience – with complex jobs that require advanced skills or training. These jobs usually require several hours or days of work. The term macrotasking is used to distinguish this type of work from microtasking – the form of crowdsourcing that focuses on short tasks that may not require advanced skills. Workers involved in macrotasking can be writers, editors, web designers, programmers, graphic artists, proofreaders, accountants, statisticians or people from many other professions.

In some cases, macrotasking is similar to freelancing, although it’s freelancing on a global scale. If you’re a worker, you can find jobs anywhere in the world. If you’re an employer, you can search that same world to find talented workers. Perhaps the most important aspect of macrotasking is that it occurs in an open, public market. Anyone can post a job or offer their services. You don’t need to send your résumé to hundreds of individuals to find a job, or to struggle to find the right kind of worker. You have a public market that can help you find both.

Macrotasking also differs from freelancing in that an organisation helps manage the relationship between you and the contractor, handles payments to the contractor, files any necessary governmental paperwork, monitors the macrotasker and verifies the number of hours worked.

I regularly receive emails from small local businesses who’re looking for a worker who has specific computer skills. ‘Help,’ these emails say, ‘I need a student who can create a spreadsheet’ (or design a SQL database, program an app, configure a network or do some other technical task).

What the people who write these emails don’t admit (or realise) is that they don’t really want a student. What they want is a trained, mature worker who has the skill to do their task and do it professionally. However, they don’t have enough work to warrant hiring a full-time employee with these skills. Instead, they may need a spreedsheet programmer for just 20 hours a year, or a database designer for a day every other month.

One strategy that such a business might employ is to hire someone who has the necessary technical skills and also the ability to do some other kind of job, such as accounting or sales. However, such a strategy’s rarely effective, because finding people with an unusual combination of skills can be tricky, and secondly, these people are always better at one job than another. For example, you may get a first-rate programmer but have to accept a second-rate accountant in the deal.

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Macrotasking enables you to separate the skills and hire workers on a task-by-task basis. You can hire the right kind of programmer for your programming jobs and the best accountant for your accounting problems.

Seeing the Benefits of Macrotasks

Many people are cautious about macrotasking. Some are concerned that, by sending work out, they’ll lose control of a project. Others worry that they’ll be unable to manage a worker who’s not physically near their office, or that they may compromise sensitive information or intellectual property. All these issues represent real concerns that you must handle in any macrotask. However, many people resist this form of crowdsourcing because they simply can’t see the opportunities for macrotasking in their organisation. And that’s a shame, because macrotasking has some great benefits:

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You get the skills you need. In conventional organisations, you often get skills that are only similar to the ones you want. A member of your sales staff can do a little programming. A member of your delivery organisation is a bit of a writer. In macrotasking, you hire a person with exactly the skills you need.

You get what you pay for. If you’re running a small business or working as an individual, you may not have enough work for a full-time PHP programmer or English–Russian translator. Through macrotasking, you hire a person for only the work that you have.

You get access to a global talent pool. No matter where you live or work, macrotasking gives you access to talented people around the globe. You may know no one in your area who can write advertising copy, create 3D models or work with Japanese government documents, but macrotasking gives you access to people who can do those things and more.

You can benefit from it, no matter who you are. Macrotasking is commonly associated with small companies or entrepreneurial start-up firms. These organisations can gain much from macrotasking, because they often lack people with specific skills and are unable to hire a full-time employee for certain tasks. However, macrotasking is also useful to individuals (see the sidebar Macrotasking for the home) and large organisations. It can be used in any situation that needs a specific skill to get a job done.

Identifying Macrotasks

Pinning down the macrotasks in a small start-up organisation is fairly easy. Small organisations always have some kind of project that current employees can’t handle. For example, a small organisation’s team may have basic business skills but lack any individual who can design a web page, or plan a marketing campaign, or draft an annual report. In a small organisation, then, you identify potential macrotasks when you find a project that needs skills that aren’t currently available in your organisation.

Identifying potential macrotasks within large organisations is trickier. Potential macrotasks can be hidden, because large organisations can almost always find someone to do a job. Some of these potential macrotask jobs may be handled by people who don’t truly have the appropriate skills, experience or training. Nonetheless, they do the tasks. So how do you know which jobs to macrotask? The following sections help you root out macrotasks.

To determine whether a task can be macrotasked, you need to examine it carefully and decide whether the work can be done independently, takes a fixed amount of time and requires special skills.

Thinking process, not organisation

When you think of organisations, you often think in terms of positions and titles. You think that your organisation has an assistant financial officer, or a manager of customer support, or a youth outreach director. In fact, you don’t build an organisation by identifying the positions that you need and deciding what to do with them. You determine what the organisation does, the work processes that it handles. Then you decide what kind of positions you need to carry out those processes.

So when you go looking for macrotasks, start by looking at the main processes of the organisation. Ask yourself, how does the organisation:

Create a product and deliver it to its customers?

Deal with its suppliers or the other companies?

Handle its basic business activities?

Organise a service and perform that service week after week?

After you identify the processes, you can break them down into individual steps, look at the way each step is performed, and ask whether that step should be handled by a permanent member of the organisation or by a macrotasker.

The National Association for the Promotion of Goodness and Virtue (NAPGV) is a lobbying group that promotes, as the name implies, things that are good and virtuous, and holds an annual conference for its supporters. The leadership, having watched the annual convention become more and more complex, has decided that it’ll try to improve the management of the conference by crowdsourcing some of the work.

To identify possible macrotasks in the conference, the NAPGV management looks at the process that’s used to create and manage the conference programme and the speakers and organisations who address the meeting. The leader of the organisation, Kamal, decides that the process to create a programme for the conference has five steps:

1. Identify and contact speakers.

2. Collect speech titles and biographies from speakers.

3. Edit a conference programme.

4. Contact speakers a week before the conference and get their presentations.

5. Edit the presentations into a standard form and put them on the conference computer.

Of these five steps, steps 2, 3 and 5 are good candidates for macrotasking. They are well defined, easy to describe, and require specific skills. Step 2 requires the skills of an administrative assistant, someone who’s organised and persistent. The work is easy to describe, and checking that it’s been done is easy. Step 3 requires the skills of an editor and document designer, and may be best divided into two macrotasks: an editor to review the material, correct problems and put it in the proper order, and a designer to format the material so that it looks good in a programme or on a web page. Step 5 requires the skills of presentation editor. Like steps 2 and 3, this task is easy to define, easy to describe and easy to check when it’s been done.

Steps 1 and 4 are difficult to macrotask. Step 1 requires a clear understanding of the goals of the conference and a knowledge of the potential speakers. Neither of these is easy to find at a macrotask market, and both are best done by a senior member of the organisation. Step 4 is difficult to macrotask because the task isn’t as well defined as it appears. When you contact speakers a week before a conference, you encounter problems that you didn’t anticipate. Perhaps one speaker forgets that she was going to talk. Another may ask whether he can give the same talk that he gave last year. A third may respond with cryptic messages that seem to indicate that he’s going to make up the speech on the platform of the conference. You can’t easily instruct a macrotask worker how to handle all these different circumstances, so step 4 is best done by someone within the organisation.

Identifying independent tasks

The tasks that are easiest to macrotask are those that can be done independently. In effect, you identify an activity, give it to a macrotask worker, and let him go work by himself. After the macrotasker finishes, you incorporate his contributions into your organisation.

In fact, you can be a little more specific about the nature of an independent task. Independent tasks are those that are:

Easy to describe: In some cases, the tasks are easy to describe because they’re simple tasks. If you’re asking someone to proofread a document and find any grammatical errors, you’re describing a relatively simple task.

However, many complicated tasks are also easy to describe. The description is easy because the task relies on complex ideas that professional communities have spent years developing. For example, if need a purchase and sales agreement that’s valid in certain countries, you’re asking for a highly complex item. However, anyone who’s qualified to draft such a document quickly knows what you need.

Based on obvious goals: You should be able to identify exactly the kind of work product that you expect and criteria that you’ll use to judge whether the work’s been properly done.

Simple to coordinate: The jobs should require only limited contact with the others who’re working on the bigger process. If the task requires the worker to talk with other members of the team several times a day or requires him to meet the rest of the team often, then it probably isn’t a good macrotask.

Choosing what’s important

In macrotasking, you need to focus on your goals. You may be looking to:

Create a more flexible structure that can quickly respond to changing conditions

Get a higher-quality operation

Improve your organisation

Reduce costs

After you identify potential macrotasks, examine each and ask:

Is it an independent task?

Is it simple to describe?

Does it have a fixed deadline?

Does it require special skills?

If you answer ‘no’ to all these questions, the task may not be suitable for macrotasking. If you answer ‘yes’ to at least one of the questions, you may have found an activity that you can macrotask.

Every organisation has different managerial skills and different abilities to macrotask. Some organisations can manage only the simplest macrotasks. Some had can handle highly complicated tasks. Some are able to macrotask only the jobs that require highly specialised skills. Others feel comfortable macrotasking with any kind of macrotask, including jobs that can be done by full-time employees if they have the time. You have to determine the tasks that can be best handled by your organisation.

Finding a fixed deadline

Good candidates for macrotasks are short-term jobs. The work of preparing sales material for a new market is a good candidate for a macrotask. A macrotask worker should be able to do that job in a fixed time. The bigger task of opening a new market for your products is probably not a good macrotask. Such a task could easily require more time than anyone anticipates.

However, macrotasks aren’t limited to short-term work. You may have a job that’s done regularly that doesn’t require a deep or permanent knowledge of your organisation. You may find several jobs that are done once a year and require limited knowledge of what was done the previous year, such as designing a conference logo.

If you’re looking at jobs that recur regularly, ask, ‘Would I be satisfied if a new person did this job each time it’s needed?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, the task is a good candidate for macrotasking.

Requiring special skills

If a task involves special skills that you normally don’t require in your organisation, consider macrotasking. The skills of a videographer, for example, may not be common in your organisation. You may not regularly need the skills or a copywriter, or a graphic designer, or a web designer.

A job needn’t require special skills to be a good macrotask job. Many organisations need to expand their workforce for a short period each year. They may choose to macrotask an aspect of work that their staff normally handle during the rest of the year.

Preparing the Macrotask

After you identify a macrotask, you need to prepare it. You can quickly see that macrotasking can be powerful, but it’s not magic. Like all forms of management, macrotasking requires careful preparation. By preparing carefully, you’re more likely to get the job done well, on time and on budget. You’re also in the best position to get the full benefits of macrotasking.

After you’ve identified a macrotask, you need to decide how it’ll fit into your organisation. If you work by yourself, you have few decisions to make; you’ve identified the macrotask, you’ll hire the macrotask worker and you’ll determine when the job is done properly. However, if you’re working in a larger organisation, you may have to decide how the macrotasker will interact with the other employees. You may have identified the macrotask, but you may not be the right person to manage the macrotask worker or determine when the task is done. The macrotask worker may be managed by an employee who reports to you, or may be part of a team of people who work together as equals, or may be able to work without having any contact with anyone in your organisation.

When you macrotask a job, you’re responsible for making sure that the macrotask worker fits into your organisation. That’s where this section comes in.

Naming the manager

Macrotaskers need to have a manager or point of contact. In general, macrotasking should follow the most fundamental rule of management: workers need a single manager. That manager should be the person who hires the macrotasker, gives directions to the macrotasker, and determines when the macrotask has been properly completed.

Macrotaskers usually have only limited contact with your organisation. They aren’t part of the informal dynamics of your office. They may not be able to determine who has real influence and who doesn’t, whose opinions are more important and who’s merely repeating gossip. To make effective use of macrotasking, carefully define how the macrotasker is to engage with your organisation, and then follow that definition.

Putting together a statement of work for macrotask workers

As with all forms of crowdsourcing, the statement of work is at the centre of your relationship with the macrotasker. In the statement of work, you describe what the macrotasker needs to do.

Chapter 11 contains heaps of helpful guidance on preparing a statement of work. Here, I offer some specific tips for elements of a macrotasking statement of work:

Cost: You need to decide what to pay the macrotasker. The wage of the worker relates to the skill and reputation of the worker, which is generally connected to quality of work, speed of work and the ability to communicate easily and well with the employer. For macrotasking, you have a choice:

• Fixed fee: You encourage the worker to get the project done quickly and with the least amount of effort. However, you need to be able to create a good estimate, one that’s close to the actual effort required. If you don’t, you overpay for the work or the task may be unfinished.

A fixed fee offers one substantial benefit to the crowdsourcer: under most fixed fee arrangements, the crowdsourcer need not pay the macrotasker for the work unless the entire project is done properly. You, as the crowdsourcer, decide whether the project has been properly done.

Because the fixed-fee scheme puts some risk on the workers, macrotaskers don’t like it as much as hourly payment. Hence, they tend to ask for a fixed fee that’s higher than the rate that they’d get if they were paid for the same job by the hour.

Crowdsourcing platforms handle fixed fee payments in different ways. Some don’t offer them. Others don’t allow the crowdsourcer to refuse all payments to a worker if the job’s done badly. You should check the policies of the website that you plan to use before you offer a job to a worker.

• Hourly rate: Most sites post the wages of sample workers and let you cap the number of hours worked on a project. The hourly model is easier to adjust when you don’t have a good estimate. However, it gives little incentive to the worker to minimise the effort.

When you use the hourly rate for paying macrotaskers, you pay for the work done. Few macrotask websites guarantee the quality of the work. If you think that the work’s not being done well, stop the work and cease payment for any more work. However, you’re obligated to pay for all the work that the macrotasker’s already done.

The amount that you offer directly affects the quality and number of people who make a proposal for your task. A low price attracts only low-skilled workers. A higher price attracts both low-skilled workers and higher-skilled workers. The project cost will also come up in negotiations with potential macrotaskers. See the later section Reviewing the proposal.

Delivery date: Here’s an old joke: ‘If you don’t set a deadline, the project will never be late.’ You need to determine when you want the macrotask completed and set a deadline.

In macrotasking, workers are often tempted to juggle several tasks at the same time. At any given moment, they may work on the project that interests them most or that promises the greatest payment or has the most pressing deadline. You can’t control the interests of the macrotasker and you’ve only limited influence over the relative value of your task. However, you can set a firm deadline – but the macrotasker may try to negotiate.

Intermediate milestones: Tracking the progress of a macrotask isn’t easy. You won’t be working in an office with the macrotasker, so you can’t drop by the macrotasker’s desk and ask, informally, how things are going. To track your macrotask, you need to have concrete milestones or intermediate products. These products show the progress that the macrotasker is making. Intermediate products may be things such as an organisation chart for a web page, a storyboard for a video project or a rough draft of an annual report.

Many of the commercial macrotasking sites have software that allows you to follow the number of hours that the macrotasker’s working and to collect intermediate products.

Final requirements: The statement of work should include a description of the final item product to be delivered to you and the criteria that you’ll use to determine whether the work’s been well done. For certain macrotasks, you need to describe how the work product is to fit into a bigger product or system. For example, you may be macrotasking animated graphics for your website. You want to see both the original graphic and the graphic after installation on the web page.

Additional requirements: You may want to describe other aspects of the macrotask, such as the kind of tools that the macrotasker should use or the places where he should find data, or any other aspect of the job that you think important.

Describe as few additional requirements as possible. In crowdsourcing, you rely on the wisdom of the crowds, and hence you want to give your macrotaskers ample opportunity to express their wisdom.

Specific skills: In some cases, you want the worker to have specific skills for your macrotask. You want programs written in certain languages, analyses conducted in certain ways, documents drafted following a certain style. Be sure to include these skills in your statement of work. But because you’re relying on the wisdom of the crowd, not their individuals’ credentials, put in this section only the skills that the macrotasker must have.

When you’re starting to crowdsource, spend time browsing macrotasking websites. Look at the successful jobs. Because the site is advertising these jobs, you’ve reason to believe that they were done well and that the crowd understood the kind of work needed. You can examine statements of work and borrow ideas and ways of describing a task.

Beginning the Macrotask

In theory, you can macrotask using any website, because macrotasking is a global form of freelancing. You can macrotask from your home page, from a classified advertising service such as craigslist or even from Facebook. For some specialised tasks, you may find that such a form of macrotasking meets your needs.

However, you can accrue many benefits from macrotasking with a website that specialises in macrotasking, such as oDesk (www.odesk.com), Elance (www.elance.com), Guru (www.guru.com), uTest (www.utest.com) or one of many other sites. Posting a job on a macrotask website brings you many advantages over a request posted on craigslist or Facebook, such as:

A crowd of workers ready to take your macrotasks. Platforms that offer macrotasking have crowds of workers ready to take jobs. If you’re working on your own site or on Facebook, you may not have such a crowd waiting for your call, and you’ll have to recruit a crowd. (Skip to Chapter 10 for more about recruiting your own crowd.)

A portfolio for each worker that lets you see what workers have done on previous jobs.

Software for keeping track of the hours worked. You don’t have to rely on the macrotasker to do this or keep track yourself.

A system for keeping track of all the payment and tax issues. You pay the website, and the site pays the worker, any taxes and other payments.

A mediator who can help resolve any problems. If you and the macrotask worker get into a disagreement, the website mediates to help resolve the issue. In cases where a macrotask worker hasn’t completed a job properly, some websites offer a refund.

Choosing a site

When looking for a good macrotasking site, you’re looking for two things:

A crowd that’s capable of doing your macrotask: Different macrotasking sites specialise in different kinds of crowds. Some specialise in web development. Some specialise in smartphone app programming. Some specialise in graphic design. All advertise what they do and give examples of typical jobs. You can find out a great deal about the website simply by reading job descriptions and trying to match them to your task.

Tools that help you manage the macrotask: All the reputable crowdsourcing sites help you manage the macrotasker. Most require the macrotaskers to keep a log or have a software system that keeps track of the time they spend on the project. The sites have standard forms for statements of work and standard ways of presenting the skills and reputation of the macrotasker. Most also have a mediation service that helps you resolve a disagreement with a macrotasker, and a refund policy that helps you if things go badly wrong.

Read the site information carefully. When you start to macrotask, you’re taking more responsibility than you normally do when you order a book or an electronic gadget online. When you’re macrotasking, you’re contracting with a worker. Contracts always involve rights and responsibilities.

You can find good lists of current sites at www.crowdsourcing.org.

Posting the project

When you’ve selected a site, the next step is to post the statement of work for your project. This involves putting your description of the job on the website, together with details of the amount that you’d like to pay the worker and the deadline for the task. When you do this, you ask for members of the crowd to respond with a proposal.

The members of the crowd read the description of your job and decide whether they want to apply for it. If they want to apply, they’ll send you a proposal – a letter stating their interest – explaining how they’ll do the job and giving their opinion of how long it’ll take and how much it’ll cost.

Set yourself a deadline for reviewing the proposals. This deadline can be as short as a day after the posting or as long as a week. Determining how much time you need to get a good response to your posting is your job.

Inviting workers to your job

As well as waiting for the crowd to respond to your job description (see the preceding section), you can also take the initiative and select members of the crowd who you invite to respond. Most macrotasking websites allow you to review the portfolios of workers at the site and to ask them to respond to your job posting. For these macrotask workers, you can search for specific skills, look at their qualifications, review the work they’ve done and read recommendations.

To find the best macrotaskers for your job, examine reputations. Each macrotasker has a reputation score. For macrotasking, this score is usually based on subjective evaluations by people who’ve hired the worker. A few sites incorporate other information into the reputation, such as the cost of the jobs or the reliability of the worker in meeting deadlines. For more on reputation, skip to the later section ‘Checking the reputation’.

As you look through the lists of workers, you may see a few that you’d like to invite to apply for your job. You can click on their names and send them invitations. An invitation doesn’t guarantee that macrotaskers apply, however. Most good macrotaskers manage their project load carefully and only apply for jobs that fit into their plans.

Choosing a Macrotasker

When the deadline for responding to your posting has passed, you should have received a number of proposals from macrotaskers who’re interested in your job. To select the right macrotasker for your job, you have to review these proposals on the macrotask platform. These sites show you the proposals you’ve received and enable you to contact the workers. Most provide you with several ways to contact workers, including by email, text, Twitter and a phone service such as Skype.

Your next task is to review the proposals and select a macrotask worker to do the job. On most macrotask websites, you generally receive five things from each macrotasker who applies for your job:

A covering letter expressing interest in the work

A proposal that describes how the macrotasker would approach the work and the wage that he would like

A portfolio that shows what the macrotasker has done in the past

References and reputation scores

A résumé that shows the macrotasker’s qualifications

In some ways, selecting a macrotask worker is similar to hiring a new employee in a traditional organisation. You look at the materials that you receive and try to identify one macrotasker who’s best qualified for the job and best able to work with you. However, in the world of macrotasking, as in other forms of crowdsourcing, accomplishment is more important than formal training. The best macrotaskers are those who can demonstrate that they complete jobs on time and under budget, and who also have a reputation for working well with those who employ them.

Reading the covering letter

From the cover letter, you should be able to get an overall impression of the macrotasker, his interest in the project and his ability to do the work. The macrotasker will generally say that he’s very interested in your project, has done such work before and has a portfolio of successful projects.

Macrotaskers often apply for many jobs, so they frequently reuse covering letters and proposals. Nothing’s wrong with this practice, provided the modify the contents to show that they understand your task and are bidding on it, not on a generic task that falls within their set of skills. Look at the covering letter carefully and make sure that the applicant understands your project. If he doesn’t, move on to the next macrotasker.

Reviewing the proposal

Of all the parts of the application, the proposal should be the part most tailored to your job. In the proposal, the macrotasker must demonstrate that he understands what you’re trying to do and present a strategy for completing the task. If you’re not happy with the proposal, don’t go with that macrotasker.

In the proposal, the macrotasker may suggest a higher price for the job and a longer deadline. Such suggestions are a natural part of the negotiation process. You need to assess whether those changes are reasonable and negotiate prices and deadlines that are acceptable to you both.

Assessing the portfolio

Many crowdsourcers believe that the portfolio is the key element of the application. Indeed, because you’re hiring a person to do a specific project, you’ll be happy to see that he’s done something similar in the past.

As in all forms of hiring, you want to verify that the portfolio actually belongs to the worker. To be certain, check with the organisations that are represented in the portfolio.

Checking the reputation

In crowdsourcing, reputation is crucial. Most macrotaskers try hard to build a strong reputation, hence if you’ve a worker with a low reputation, you want to be cautious about hiring him.

You may ask questions about the reasons for a low reputation and may find a story that satisfies you. However, if the explanation of a low reputation score becomes long and places the blame on others, walk away from that macrotasker.

Keep in mind that a high reputation score may not be as useful as it appears. Many crowdsourcers know the value of the reputation score and are reluctant to give a low assessment of a worker. To get beyond this problem, contact some of the crowdsourcers who hired the macrotasker before and ask concrete questions:

Did the macrotasker complete the task on time?

Were there any unexpected complications?

Did the macrotasker make any valuable suggestions?

Was it always easy to communicate with the macrotasker?

If the answers to these questions are affirmative, you may have found a good worker.

Judging qualifications

Crowdsourcing is more concerned with results than with qualifications. If the macrotasker can demonstrate that he can do the task well, then he can get the job no matter where he went to school or how many degrees he has.

Furthermore, résumés are easier to forge than portfolios. Individuals are always willing to gamble that you won’t check their degrees or call the schools they claimed to have attended two or four or ten years ago.

In crowdsourcing, you’ve three choices:

Decide that qualifications aren’t important to you, ignore the résumé, and rely on the portfolio.

Decide that the qualifications are interesting but not the key element in your decision. In that case, you scan the résumé and see whether it’s consistent with the work that you see in the portfolio.

Decide that formal credentials are important and take the résumé seriously. In this case, you’d better check to make sure that the qualifications are accurate.

Interviewing

In macrotasking, you deal directly with the macrotasker. Hence it’s important to conduct an interview before you make an agreement with the person. In these interviews, you’re usually trying to determine whether you’re going to be able to work with the macrotasker. In some cases, you may be trying to understand some part of the proposal better or discuss the price or time required to do the job.

Most of the crowdsourcing websites allow you to communicate with the macrotaskers directly without disclosing a private email address, and you’ll usually conduct interviews over the phone or via email. Even with such a system, though, you may find email interviews a little bit daunting, especially if you or the macrotasker can’t respond to emails instantaneously.

When you conduct an interview over email, start the discussion by sending the macrotasker a note saying that you received the proposal and would like to know a little bit more. Then ask a few questions in order to start the discussion. You have to send at least one, but avoid sending more than four in a single email. When you send more than four, you’re asking for a long response that’ll take some time to compose. You get a better sense of the macrotasker through an exchange of at least two or three emails.

You can ask, for example, whether the macrotasker sees any problems in the project, whether the project is like anything he’s done before, and whether he’s working on anything else at this time. Also ask whether there’s anything he needs you to tell him.

In the interview, whether you conduct it via email or phone, try to discern three things:

Can you can work with the macrotasker? Can he take direction? Will he be responsive? Some crowdsourcers may be willing to work with difficult geniuses, but you have to decide whether you’ll be able to engage the worker and get a good result.

Do the macrotasker’s skills seem to match those demonstrated in the portfolio? You can ask how he developed some of the products in that portfolio and how he handled problems.

What’s a mutually agreeable deadline and cost? The interview forms part of the negotiation over the project. You need to agree on the deadline for the project and the cost.

Making the selection

You make a choice based on criteria that suit you and your organisation. You’re concerned about quality of work, deadlines, cost and the personal qualities of the macrotasker.

You’re hiring a macrotasker and hence may be free to take risks that you may not take with a traditional hire. You can choose someone who has more radical ideas about how to do the work, or is willing to work to a tight schedule, or who brings an unusual approach to the project. If that person’s approach doesn’t work, you can bring the project to a close and look for a new macrotasker.

When you’ve selected a macrotasker, you’re committed to him for the job that you’ve proposed. If you decide at some point that you no longer want to work with him, you have to pay for the work that he’s completed. On some websites, you have to pay for the macrotasker for the entire job. (Check the website’s policy before you make a selection.) However, when a job is complete, you’re free to choose a new macrotasker for your next job. If you find a worker you like and want to work with him again, you can usually offer him a job directly.

When you’ve made your selection, you need to notify the site of your choice. The site notifies the worker that he’s been accepted and sends messages to the other workers who applied for the job. Finally, it ensures that you’re able to pay for the work, though a credit card, a payment service such as PayPal or some other mechanism. With that taken care of, you’re ready to start the job.

Managing the work

When the job’s ready to go, you communicate with the macrotasker, offering any additional instructions, and begin the job. The macrotask platform keeps track of the number of hours that the worker devotes to the job and pays the worker for each hour. In the meantime, you can track the progress of the job through the website. Some sites give you screenshots of the macrotasker’s computer in order to verify the number of hours worked. All of them, though, give you a detailed record of the hours worked and the progress of the project.

As the job progresses, keep in regular contact with the worker. Because most jobs are relatively short, you may want to communicate with the worker at least once a day, or at the start and end of each day. If you’re working closely with the macrotasker, you may need to communicate several times a day.

When you communicate with your macrotask worker, you can either use the macrotask website or the common communications tools of email, texting, tweets and Skype. You’re generally not required to use the macrotask platform tools. However, you may prefer to use the site’s communications tools, because the site usually keeps a complete record of your communications with the worker, which has its uses.

When hiring a macrotasker to work for a company or non-profit organisation, some crowdsourcers invite the worker to remotely participate in team meetings (using Skype or a phone service) or let them be part of discussions. This can be an effective way of engaging a macrotask worker, if such an approach is right for you. Many macrotaskers enjoy working independently and don’t need close supervision.

At some point after a job’s begun, however, you may find that you develop a bad case of manager’s remorse – concluding that you hired the wrong macrotasker. If you reach that point, you can terminate your relationship with the worker. To do this, you have to notify that worker of your decision and end the job on the macrotask website. The macrotask platform will ask for your reason, and you owe the worker an explanation, as you do in any working relationship.

If you then want to complete the job on the macrotask site, you’re free to do so. You’re also able to offer the job to one of the workers who you didn’t hire first time around. However, most sites require you to start from scratch, or close to scratch. If you remain satisfied with the job description and the other details of the task, you’re able to reuse the material you’ve already prepared. However, you’ll have to open the job on the market, ask for members of the crowd to apply, evaluate the proposals and offer the job to one of the crowd.

You may ask some of the workers that you’ve already reviewed to apply for the job again, but there are no guarantees for either party. The workers may have already taken on other jobs and be unable to take on yours. After reviewing the new proposals, you may decide that you now have better options. Be civil and polite in making these choices, but you’re working with an open job market and such markets can require you to make tough decisions.

Protecting intellectual property

When you’re macrotasking, you may have a relationship with the macrotasker that resembles a conventional relationship between an employer and an employee. However, when you employ a macrotasker, you’re generally doing what’s called ‘work for hire’. You’re contracting with an individual who’ll produce a product (or provide a service) for you. You’re expecting full rights to the final product. This is the policy of most crowdsourcing websites.

If you’re macrotasking without the protections of one of the macrotasking firms, or if you need different rights to the intellectual property that your macrotasker is producing, consider having an agreement with the macrotasker to clarify those rights. You should clearly state the property rights that you have and the rights that the worker retains.

Ending the Macrotask

Sometimes a macrotask ends with a bang. Sometimes it ends with a whimper. Sometimes it ends at one moment when you receive the final product from the macrotasker, while at other times it ends slowly with a little tweak to this part of the project and small adjustments to that part. In either case, the job ends when you, the crowdsourcer, says it ends. At that point, you accept the work and notify the macrotask website that you’ll pay for no further work.

Paying the macrotasker and closing the books

In most cases, you pay the macrotasker as an hourly contract worker. This means that the macrotasker receives a payment each week throughout the project for the number of hours that he’s worked. At the end of the project, he expects only a payment for the work that he did for you during that last week.

When you pay a macrotasker by the hour, you pay for the hours he works. You’ve no guarantee that the work will be of the quality you desire. If the work doesn’t seem to be good enough for your job, you can stop the task and pay the worker nothing more. However, you’re responsible for all the hours that the macrotasker worked for you up to that point.

In some cases, you may choose to pay the worker a fixed fee for the task. When you pay in that way, review the job at the end, determine whether the work was done properly, and then authorise the payment. Macrotaskers generally don’t like this form of payment, though, because of the risk of not being paid when the work’s done.

Assessing the experience

When a job’s over, macrotasking websites usually ask you to review the quality of the macrotasker’s work. These reviews are important to both the macrotasker, who will use the good reviews to get new jobs, and to the crowdsourcers who may next hire the macrotasker. As you review the work, respond to the basic questions that a crowdsourcer may have, such as:

How well did the macrotasker understand the job and do it as you described?

Did the crowdsourcer do the job on time and for the budget offered?

How well did the crowdsourcer work with you? Was the communication good and timely?

Was the crowdsourcer able to bring something to the task that you didn’t see? Did he improve on your description?

Considering an Example: Creating an App

Aled runs a specialised publishing house called Moment Upon the Stage that sells play scripts to actors. Actors often need to find a script for an audition at short notice. Because many actors survive on little income, they often lack powerful laptops and broadband connections. However, nearly all have smartphones. Therefore, Aled decides that a good marketing move is to create a smartphone application (app) that allows an actor to order a script and maybe even download that script to his phone.

The smartphone app, if properly done, will add value to Moment Upon the Stage and expand the sales and distribution process. But Moment Upon the Stage doesn’t have the expertise to develop such an app. The business has no more sophisticated technology support than Aled’s niece, Caitlin, who stops by the office once a week to see whether the computers are running properly, checks that the printers still have toner, and reminds her uncle that he needs to be careful when he hits the ‘Reply All’ button on an email. So when it comes to creating an app, Aled needs help.

Checking that your task is a macrotask

Aled asks himself four key questions (see the earlier section Choosing what’s important) to determine whether creating the app is a good candidate for macrotasking:

Is it an independent task? Yes, the macrotasker can do the job himself, without support from Aled’s company.

Is it simple to describe? The goals of the work can be clearly outlined so that the macrotasker knows the criteria for successful completion.

Does it have a fixed deadline? Yes. The goal of the project is clear and concrete and should produce a fixed deadline.

Does it require special skills? The organisation doesn’t have the skills to produce an app – so yes, the task does require special skills.

Writing the statement of work

To engage effectively with the crowd, Aled sets about putting together a good statement of work. He covers the following areas:

Job description: In this case, Aled knows more about what he wants the app to do than how the app should work. Many crowdsourcers are in this kind of circumstance. So, to understand how to write a good description, he goes to a couple of macrotasking websites and looks for similar descriptions. As he writes the description, Aled decides to ask potential applicants to put the job description into their own words. If Aled can understand a potential macrotasker’s description of the job, then he believes he’ll be able to work with him.

Cost: By looking at a macrotasking website (such as oDesk or Elance), Aled notes that macrotaskers earn between $10 (£6.30) and $60 (£37.80) per hour for programming apps. Aled knows that he needs someone with experience and someone who can work with a technology novice such has himself, so he decides to offer a wage of $40 (£25.20), which is above the medium wage and should attract some good programmers.

Delivery date: Aled wants the app tomorrow but knows that a deadline like that just isn’t realistic. Again, he turns to the jobs on a macrotasking website for guidance and decides that similar tasks seem to take about 40 hours, so he uses that figure as his estimate.

Intermediate milestones: Initially, Aled can’t think of an appropriate intermediate milestone for the job, but he learns from looking at the macrotasking websites that he should ask for a mock-up of the app (sometimes called a wireframe) that allows him to see all the different app screens. Aled decides that he wants to approve such a mock-up before the macrotasker moves to the next stage of work.

Final requirements: Aled is cautious about how to test the new app, but his niece, Caitlin, suggests that she be the first person to test it. Her thinking is that because she understands software, she should be able to make the app work. If she can’t make it work, then the app will be sent back to the macrotasker for more work.

Caitlin suggests giving the app to Aled next, to see whether he can make it work. As Aled had conceived the app, he should be able to make it work, even though he isn’t very good with software. If he can make it work, then they can move on to the final test.

For the final test, Caitlin assembles a dozen of her friends. One’s actually an actor, but most are entry-level employees in various New York offices. They all have different phones and different skills with technology. By getting them together, she can see what they’re doing and determine whether any aren’t able to understand how the app works. If all her friends are able to purchase a script, then the app will pass its final test.

Additional requirements: Caitlin suggests that her uncle Aled requires that the macrotasker be available for six months after the end of the job to fix any bugs.

Specific skills: Aled lists all the phones that should be able to use the app.

Posting the job

Aled chooses a macrotasking website, creates an account, and follows the instructions to post the job. He identifies the job as ‘smart phone app development’ and puts it on the site. In addition to the job description, the site asks for the number of hours that he estimates for the job and any deadlines that he has. He enters his estimate of 40 hours and decides to add a note to say that he wants the app within a month. He knows that the macrotasker may be doing multiple jobs, and doesn’t want his job pushed behind the others.

As the last step of posting his job, Aled has to enter the hourly wage that he’s offering. He’d originally decided he was willing to pay up to $40 (£25.20) in order to keep his costs low, but decides to go with a slightly higher wage of $50 (£31.50) to attract more high-quality workers, to encourage a little competition between them and to allow him to choose one who offers to do the job for his desired price of $40.

With the job on the task market, Aled reviews the profiles of workers who state they’re interested in app development jobs. As he scrolls through the list, he sees a couple of people who seem qualified for his job. He sends them a message, inviting them to apply for his job. This is a service offered by the website – a way to bring good workers to jobs that are a good match for them.

Hiring the macrotasker

Within a few days of posting his job, Aled has almost 100 applications. He decides to thin the pool by using the website’s reputation score and by looking at the job history of the applicants. He removes any worker who’s not achieved a job reputation of eight stars or higher (out of a possible ten). He also removes anyone who’s not been able to earn a wage close to the median wage on the site for app programmers. He reasons that anyone who can’t earn that figure on the site isn’t a top programmer.

Looking at the materials, Aled selects three people who seem to understand the project and have good experience and recommendations, and he conducts email interviews. He always starts by asking the potential macrotasker to describe the project back to him. He then asks the candidates whether they see any problems in the project, whether they have any recommendations, and how they would react if he decided to change the project after seeing the mock-up. One programmer seems especially genial, and so Aled chooses him.

Following the work

Aled decides that he’ll ask for updates twice a week from the macrotasker. He can learn the number of hours worked from the macrotasker website, so Aled asks for a description of how much progress has been made on the app. He receives the mock-up after a week and a final version of the app after three weeks.

Ending the macrotask

The macrotask ends after Caitlin held her Saturday-morning test. The group found one problem with the app. The problem’s probably not a bug, a mistake in programming, but a detail that Aled hadn’t explained well in the original job description. The macrotasker fixes the issue and lets the group test the app one more time. Then Aled closes the project on the website, asks the macrotasker to be available for six more months, and releases the app to his customers.