Applied Software Project Management

Collaborate with the Vendor

If you are the project manager on an outsourced project, your day-to-day work will be similar to what you would do on a project for software being developed in-house. There are, however, some important changes you need to make, in order to work with the vendor. Because it's so easy for the vendor to get lost in the details and lose context, tools and techniques in every phase of the software project must be modified, in order to keep the vendor in the loop and communicate your high-level goals for the product.

Plan and Manage the Project Scope

In an in-house project, you start with the project scope and the set of resources already known to the organization, and use those to estimate the schedule, budget, and due date (using the tools and techniques in Chapters 2 through 4). An outsourced project, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite: you start with a scope and a budget, and the vendor provides an estimate on the number of resources and the time expected to complete the project.

This is one of the main advantages to outsourcing: you have much more flexibility in allocation of resources. You can specify the scope and the expected budget, and ask for an estimate on both the number of resources and the expected time to complete the project. Alternately, you can specify the scope and the deadline, and ask the outsourcing vendor to estimate the number of resources and the project cost. However, in all cases, you will still need to know the scope of the ...