Page 271 -

It is very important that you maintain this positive, cooperative relationship with your
vendor’s management. This is not always easy. There are times when the vendor has pro-
cedures in place that make it more difficult for you to see what’s going on in your project,
communicate with your team, or do your work in other ways. When this happens, don’t
just go in and make a bunch of changes. Instead, carefully discuss the problems and
reevaluate the procedures that caused them. There is nothing wrong with the vendor hav-
ing a business to run. Vendors need to keep their employees happy and challenged. Some-
times there are situations in which the vendor’s goals are simply different than yours, and
you must reach a compromise by being open, honest, and transparent.
One common mistake that many project managers make is to set up a complex or convo-
luted escalation process. Some vendors come to the table with these escalation procedures
prebuilt, inserting a layer that blocks communication between you and your team. A pol-
icy that puts an escalation process in place will typically require that a team member first
talk to the project lead and then to the manager at the vendor (and often one or two other
people) before they are allowed to communicate directly with you. (This time-consuming
process is often put in place specifically to bolster the management hierarchy at the ven-
dor.) Often, the escalation procedure resembles the playground game of “telephone,”
where a message is passed from person to person until it is essentially unrecognizable. This
is not a good way to communicate, especially when a problem is serious enough to war-
rant the involvement of the vendor’s senior management (who will not know the specifics
of the problem and are therefore more likely to obfuscate it).
Some people are more comfortable with an escalation process in place than without it.
Middle managers at a vendor like it, because they can intercept problems that might be
potentially embarrassing (such as an incompetent team member). They can better manage
the client’s perception by only allowing the “good” questions to be asked: for example,
they can tweak the questions to make them seem less negative. Many project managers
also like the escalation process, because it provides distance (and cover) if the project starts
to go wrong. The further they are from the project team, the less culpable they are for its
failures—it gives them a sort of “plausible deniability.”
There are often good reasons for this. Many outsourcing clients are very hands-off and do

not want to be “bothered” with the day-to-day operations at the vendor. Sometimes that
makes sense, like when the client has little IT or project management experience. Many
clients who have outsourced work honestly can’t handle the idea that any mistakes have
been made, and, even though that’s a completely irrational and unrealistic expectation,
they will use it as a reason to start renegotiating or dismantling contracts. These proce-
dures are there to protect the vendor from crazy or irrational clients—and there are an
awful lot of those in the outsourcing world!
However, since you are a good project manager and a reasonable person, you can work
with the vendor to adjust things so that they work better for everyone involved. If there is
a convoluted escalation procedure in place at the vendor, you are perfectly within your
rights as a client to modify it or, even better, dismantle it entirely. This is okay, even if

MANAGING AN OUTSOURCED PROJECT 263