uTest announce today three community-driven programs that may represent a paradigm change in mechanisms that drive worker performance.  While the advantages of crowdsourcing to leverage a distributed virtual on-demand labor pool, to fulfill a range of tasks from simple to complex appear apparent, it seems the model is not without flaw. Numbers of staff can be ramped-up for a fee or turned off, typically without incremental cost. However, there are challenges managing a workforce that isn’t dedicated and not paid to turn up to work at 9am each day. So how do you optimize a workforce that works voluntarily?  I spoke with Matt Johnston uTest’s CMO, who shared some insights into their leading-edge approaches for worker management in a crowdsourcing environment.

uTest’s crowdsourcing model is vastly different from a traditional organizational structure. When a firm employs staff, the levers for managing performance are inherent within the firm’s people management frameworks. They don’t all work to the same standard from organization to organization, but to a greater or lesser extent, they are there!

Alternatively, if you don’t want to own the responsibility for getting the work done and you wish to focus instead on the achievement of outcomes, you can outsource the work. There is an abundance of choice and countless companies eager to perform.

The success of outsourcing as a model is a function of an organization’s ability to focus on what it does best.  If you are a programmer in an outsourcing company, you are a revenue generator, not an overhead. Outsourcing firms need to drive, on average, twice the performance of in-house teams in order to reach levels of productivity that provide the client with a cost advantage, and the vendor with a margin. So, it seems logical then that any further labor arbitrage advantage gained via a crowdsourcing model must be a function of cheaper labor, which must lead to lower quality work. uTest, a leading provider of crowdsourced software testing services , believes it can prove the opposite is true!

One of the tenets of crowdsourcing is the willingness of online workers to engage in helping fellow community members. If you can harness and reward this natural behavior you can change the paradigm. uTest’s announcement today of organizational frameworks that enable community-driven teaching, mentoring and vetting promise to push the envelope towards the delivery of the most self-sufficient, self-teaching and self-policing crowdsourcing model.

Traditional models for labor optimization don’t work for a crowdsourcing business model. There are basically three forms of traditional organizational models for the management and optimization of labor: the command and control model that drives performance through an organizational hierarchy, the certified skills model delivers efficiency by ensuring the optimal number of individuals with a given level of expertise, and the pyramid sensitive model which delivers efficiency and productivity by driving work through a highly leveraged pyramid structure (i.e. one team lead to five stream leads to twenty five programmers, etc.).

In a crowdsourcing business model you must disregard these frameworks and the handbooks that teach the traditional philosophies of organizational leadership. As Johnston explained to me, uTest took a hard look at its business model to decide whether it wanted to be a services company or a product company.

As a services company uTest recognized that it would need to invest in organizational infrastructure that was scalable to ensure the correct ratio of uTest Project Managers to community testers. The problem with this model, apart from the economics, was that it wasn’t best for the customer or the crowd. uTest also acknowledged that while continued investment in its platform was a critical investment in enabling infrastructure, it was in fact a people based business. Being that the vast majority of uTest’s “people” was its community of workers - 40,000 and counting distributed across in 175 countries - it recognized that it was in fact neither a service or product business, but a community business.

With the new model for community management, uTest is taping into the natural behaviors already prevalent within its community. By identifying, nurturing and rewarding the talent that stands out within its workforce, uTest’s model creates a new set of dynamics that fuse the advantages of a traditional model of organizational discipline, normally only achieved with a dedicated workforce, in this case with the flexibility and cost advantages of a crowdsourcing delivery model.

Three new programs announced today are aimed at supporting a model that is introducing self-governance within a crowdsourced workforce.

The uTest Sandbox is a simulated testing environment that allows for the assessment of new testers by high-reputation testers from within the uTest community. Newbie testers are vetted by qualified folk who have already proven themselves in the real world. The experienced testers get to try their hand at overseeing workers in a safe environment, and are therefore afforded the opportunity to be singled out for advancement to a higher reputation status.

Providing a test environment for applications professionals is not new but in a crowdsourcing model creating an environment and incentives for community members to advance, is. uTest rewards it’s top Sandbox performers by promoting new testers to “fee earning” engagements and by remunerating testers for assessing the performance of new community members.

uTest has also launched a program called Crash Courses which directly serves the needs of the uTest community for testing-related training.  Crash Course follows uTest’s FUBU formula (“For uTesters, By uTesters”) providing opportunities for uTest’s highest skilled workers to contribute to the development needs of the wider community.

While there is no direct compensation to the Testers who develop the Crash Courses, we know from research into motivation and reward systems for online communities that the intrinsic motivational factor inherent in this program will fuel it’s sustainability and expansion.

The trump card however might be uTest’s Test Team Lead program which is a program that gives Testers the opportunity to assume paid leadership roles within the community, mentoring and helping other testers succeed in their work. The potential advantages of this model are huge.  uTest’s customers benefit by having a proven Testing expert involved in their test cycles and response times for issue resolution by testers is reduced dramatically. The Tester participates in the work and provides a filtering and prioritization mechanism to assist the uTest Project Manager increase throughput.  For the Tester, they are provided with additional payment on a fixed fee basis depending on the complexity and length of test cycle. It also provides the tester with an opportunity for advancement within the uTest community ranks, an element typically absent from a crowdsourcing business model.

In the nascent world of crowdsourcing, uTest is evolving and refining its model rapidly having already claimed the mantel of directing the largest pool of application testers globally (Infosys is the second largest with 35,000 workers). From it’s founding in 2007, uTest recognized the need to provide coordination of community based testers and in 2009 introduced the uTest Project Manager role. Today’s announcements provide the potential for a paradigm shift as the new programs introduce innovative performance mechanisms into their highly distributed work force, as well as providing uTest with a platform to build a truly scalable business.