Page 275 -

The way to build up credibility with your team is to show that your interests are in line
with theirs, and that you are often right. It’s no coincidence that this is exactly what you
need to do with your team in your own organization. The difference is that when you are
a project manager of an in-house project, you come to the table already in an authorita-
tive role. With this team, you have a much different role. You have wide authority to
modify the team and to add or remove people, but you start out with very little credibility
to make technical decisions (although you do have the authority to do so).

It’s very important to see this from the team members’ point of view. Consider a project in
which the project manager is trying to guide the team toward making technical decisions
that they are not fully comfortable with. In an in-house situation, if this situation leads to
a failed project, the team can stand behind their manager and point to a decision that was
made for them. With an outsourced project, the project manager is accountable in his own
organization, but the team members are just as accountable in the vendor’s organization.
If the vendor loses the contract, the team members will be blamed and their careers will be
impacted. So it takes some work to get them to trust you—and rightfully so.

It’s harder to earn the trust of the vendor team than it is to earn the trust of an in-house
team. You are not at the vendor every day, and the team does not know you and does not
have the opportunity to get to know you. This is especially difficult when you make an
unpopular decision, whether it concerns team responsibilities, technology, specific
approaches to problems being solved, or some other decision. Every group in every orga-
nization discusses decisions that are made by managers; usually you will be there to
defend those decisions if they are misunderstood. However, in an outsourced situation,
your decisions have legs. People may attribute motives to your decisions that you did not
intend. They may see those decisions as personal rather than professional. And worse,
they may not feel comfortable enough talking to you to ask you about them. Team mem-
bers have spent their careers at the organization learning its particular culture and pro-
cesses, and the client is suddenly making changes to them. Often, you have not had time
to evaluate how your changes will work with the process: this is another barrier to earn-
ing the team’s trust, and you need to take it into account when working with them. The
more open you can be to the team members’ perspectives, the more intelligent your deci-
sions will be. (Don’t forget that you generally benefit from team members’ experiences on

past projects!)
You cannot expect to be at the vendor every time your decisions are called into question.
This is why your partnership with the management of the vendor’s company is so essen-
tial. They are your ambassadors to the team, and, if they trust you and understand why
you have made your decisions, you can depend on them to smooth out these problems.
This is why you need to be transparent with them about your decisions and the reasoning
behind those decisions.

MANAGING AN OUTSOURCED PROJECT 267