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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 ven-
dor. 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 pro-
vides 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 allo-
cation 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 project. Luckily, there is very little difference in defining
the scope of an outsourced project and defining one within your organization. The
description of the vision and scope document in Chapter 2 can be used in an outsourced
context as well.

However, there is one aspect of the project that is known during the planning stage but
that is not covered in a typical vision and scope document for an in-house project: knowl-
edge transfer. The outsourced vendor will not have prior knowledge of your organization,
its products, or its users. It is your responsibility to teach your team about your organiza-
tion and its goals. This can be done through meetings, documentation, working off-site at
the vendor, bringing consultants from the vendor on-site to work with your organization’s
management and experts, or some combination of these things.

The main advantage to having someone from the vendor come to work at your organiza-
tion is that it is less disruptive to you. It can be a successful way of transferring informa-
tion; the person who works with you can act as your advocate within the project team,
and she can use her understanding of your needs to keep the project team on track. The
disadvantage is that you are depending on that person to collect the information, rather
than teaching it yourself. This means that any misunderstanding might not be easily rec-
ognized early in the project. Also, each piece of information must first be learned by the
vendor’s representative and then retaught to all of the other members of the team; that
takes time, and it may be less reliable than teaching it yourself.

The most effective way to avoid these problems is by working directly with the vendor’s
team. (Many vendors are located in the same city as the organizations they work for, but if

268 CHAPTER ELEVEN