This question will produce absolutely no valuable answers without providing at least a bit of context.
What are you trying to accomplish? What problems are you facing? What do you intend to do with this budget?
You can hire 100 code monkeys and have them accomplish _anything_ just to say you spent the budget, or you can provide rigid leadership in a certain direction. It's up to you to decide whether they succeed or fail.
Whatever your full time people either can’t do or would be so miserable doing that they’d quit if you put them on it for more than a few days at a time.
* are not opportunities for your team to develop skills that they care about
* have discrete, well-defined deliverables
* you can easily integrate the results into your product or operation and they will require little maintenance.
Regarding project size, I think it would be best to start with small but non-trivial projects to establish trust with freelancers and prove the results of this program to whoever is giving you this budget (even if it is yourself). Then, once you have established connections with proven workers, give them larger tasks in their areas of expertise.
Finally, and I say this with some bias as a freelancer myself (who will probably be cold-emailing you about this once I look in your bio), I would say to stay away from large freelance platforms like upwork and instead hire from your business network. Be ready to but work into finding the right person, almost like an employee, and be prepared to pay for quality, it is worth the cost.
I would ask them to work on solutions for office tasks that should be automated or are otherwise annoying or barriers to faster/quality delivery. I would ask for documentation describing the problem to be solved before work begins and a review of their tested solution once it is functional.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadWhat are you trying to accomplish? What problems are you facing? What do you intend to do with this budget?
You can hire 100 code monkeys and have them accomplish _anything_ just to say you spent the budget, or you can provide rigid leadership in a certain direction. It's up to you to decide whether they succeed or fail.
* fall outside the existing skillset of your team
* are not opportunities for your team to develop skills that they care about
* have discrete, well-defined deliverables
* you can easily integrate the results into your product or operation and they will require little maintenance.
Regarding project size, I think it would be best to start with small but non-trivial projects to establish trust with freelancers and prove the results of this program to whoever is giving you this budget (even if it is yourself). Then, once you have established connections with proven workers, give them larger tasks in their areas of expertise.
Finally, and I say this with some bias as a freelancer myself (who will probably be cold-emailing you about this once I look in your bio), I would say to stay away from large freelance platforms like upwork and instead hire from your business network. Be ready to but work into finding the right person, almost like an employee, and be prepared to pay for quality, it is worth the cost.