Project Management for Trainers: Stop "Winging It" and Get Control of Your Training Projects

Shared Risk

Consider being specific up front about how the internal and external partners will share the risk of the outsourced project. In their book The Discipline of Market Leaders (Reading, MA, Perseus Press, 1997), Treacy and Wiersema introduce the term customer intimacy. Because outsourcing in the training field is almost always for the delivery of a service, it often makes sense to build a customer intimate relationship, meaning that both the provider and the purchaser of services equally share the cost of failure and the benefits of success. Consider what will happen in the following situations:

• The project deliverables are late. (Options: sliding pay scale, fines, penalties)

• The project deliverables are not high enough quality. (Options: ...