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your team is in another city or country, this could mean spending weeks, or even months,
living out of a suitcase!) By going directly to the team, you can be sure that you have com-
municated your needs effectively. You can verify the team’s knowledge in conversation and,
if necessary, through a test or quiz. When a project manager works directly with the vendor’s
team, the knowledge transfer takes less time and there is less chance for misunderstanding.

Your method for knowledge transfer should be decided and covered in the vision and
scope document. One effective way to do this is to include the vendor as a project stake-
holder. This should make sense: the vendor has clear needs (including knowledge trans-
fer) that must be fulfilled on the project. By adding the vendor as a stakeholder, you
ensure that those needs will be considered when planning the project tasks.

Some project managers limit their interaction with the team to a set of milestone reviews
during the project. For those managers, deadlines are the only monitoring tools. This is a
mistake—the project manager cannot be disconnected from the project like that. It takes
time and effort to work with the individual team members to verify that the work is being
done properly, and that it meets the standards that your organization needs; if you don’t
take the time to do this, you can lose control of your project and not even know it. Unfor-
tunately, by default, most outsourcing projects are set up so that the project manager at
the client has a very small role in the project, and the contractor is responsible for keeping
the team on track.
Success for the project manager and success for the vendor are often two different things.
The project manager wants to deliver the software that meets the needs of the stakehold-
ers in the project. The subcontracted team is trying to meet its contractual obligations. If
the contract is not written specifically enough, or if the project manager is not able to col-
laborate with the team and revise its goals when necessary, it is likely that the goals of the
project manager and the goals of the subcontracted team will diverge and possibly even be
in conflict with one another.
Do Your Own Estimation

The estimation process in Chapter 2 was based on the assumption that the work being
estimated would be done by a known project team. That isn’t always the case when you

work with an outsourced vendor. Once your team is in place, you can use the process out-
lined in the chapter in much the same way. But when you are negotiating your initial
contract, the people who are estimating the effort are most likely not the people who will
eventually do the work.
Learn about your resources: ask them about their backgrounds and about what they are
capable of, in order to understand who should be assigned to various tasks. Find out who
is more senior in your team; adjust expectations, if necessary, based on the new estimates
they give you. Remember, even if they don’t work for your organizations, these are not
just faceless resources—they’re people with different capabilities and skill sets. The more
effort you put into understanding them, the more likely they will understand your project
and its goals, and the more accurate your team’s estimates will be.

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