Applied Software Project Management

Chapter 11. Managing an Outsourced Project

Managing projects is hard. Scope creeps, changes go uncontrolled, defects are introduced, schedules are delayed...and that's all in your own organization, where your software engineering team is right down the hall. Imagine how difficult it is to get even these results when your team is in another organization in an entirely different building—and possibly in a city halfway around the world! When you hire a company outside your organization to build your software, you open up yourself, your project, and your organization to exactly these problems.

Unfortunately, that straightforward reasoning seems to be lost on many people. The fact is that outsourcing is risky, and many people find that their projects go awry. Gartner, a respected research and consulting group, recently (at the time of this writing) published a report that predicted that half of IT outsourcing projects in the next 2 years will fail, and that 60 percent of organizations that outsource customer-facing processes will find that hidden costs and customer problems have wiped out any cost savings. This implies that leading an outsourced project requires a different set of skills than most project managers are familiar with. If you are used to working with an in-house team, you personally will need to change your approach to project management if you want to get your outsourced project done right.

There are a lot of overly optimistic books, articles, and papers written about outsourcing. ...