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It’s not just processes at the vendor that need to be adjusted for your project. You may
need to adjust them in your own organization as well. For example, your organization
may have security policies or intellectual property policies that make it more difficult for
you to manage your projects. These are problems you would normally never have to think
about, but, since you are working with an outside vendor, you may now have to take
them into account. Sometimes companies do not have policies in place to share informa-
tion between the client company and a subcontractor. This slows down the process of cre-
ating software and sometimes makes it impossible for the expectations to be met.
Many project managers find it difficult to communicate project priorities to the team. Just
as you might be the sole point of contact for your organization, you may be working with
a single point of contact in the vendor’s company who handles your requests. They may
misinterpret you, or never actually understand your goals. Unless you negotiate for it, you
may never actually have access to the team.

Build a Relationship with Your Team
You don’t have the same kind of relationship with the team that you would with a team
in your own organization. As project manager, you do not directly hire the resources
assigned to the project. You can veto any team member, but you do not have immediate
access to employment history, performance reviews, personnel files, salary information, or
other important information you would usually need to make those decisions. If someone
does a bad job, your only recourse is to have him moved off of your project. It’s likely that
he is never even told that there was a problem; he’s probably just been told that he’s been
reassigned. This means that your team could contain people who were removed from
other projects in the past due to performance problems and don’t know it.
You have to gain the respect of the people you have hired to do your project. The simple
fact that you’re paying the bill doesn’t establish you as the ultimate authority in how the
vendor should manage the project. It’s your job to establish yourself as a credible partner
and to work with the people at the vendor, in order to make sure they meet your goals
(and to assure them that you respect theirs!).
It’s a common misconception that, because you are paying a contractor, you have more

control over the work product. Somehow people assume that by simply writing a big
enough check, a vendor will snap to attention and build exactly the software they need.
After all, their payment depends on the client’s satisfaction, right? So the vendor must be
doing everything they need to do in order to satisfy the client. This is an odd attitude: you
also pay your employees, and their performance reviews are dependent on your satisfac-
tion as well, but that does not guarantee that all of their projects will succeed. The truth is
that outsourcing projects are at least as likely to have problems as in-house projects. And
when they do have problems, you have only a few possible recourses. This means that you
actually have less control over the performance of individual outsourced team members
and their work products than you would with an in-house team.

Being the sole point of contact with the subcontract team is a big change for many project
managers. When you are the project manager for an in-house project, your team has

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