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Once your team has been created, you should work with them; gather the team members
together and hold a Wideband Delphi estimation session. (Alternately, use another
method to gather estimates from the team—the important thing is that the team uses a
repeatable method for estimating the software, and that they agree that the estimates are
realistic.) When the team makes the new estimate, use the same materials that were used
to create the initial contract. This is a your first chance to see if your original expectations
were realistic.

It’s important to keep in mind that the original estimate done by the vendor may already
have been written into a contract. If the numbers that your team comes up with are differ-
ent than those written into the contract, you may have a problem with your budget or
with your own legal people. You may need to renegotiate the contract, or you may need
to add (and pay for) more resources, in order to meet your deadlines. But it’s much better
to know this at the beginning of the project rather than find out later on, when the work
is underway.
One common and very unfortunate pitfall that many people fall into is assuming that all of
the estimates from a vendor are padded (just like an in-house project!). Even worse, many
project managers assume that the vendors’ estimates are chronically underestimated (“They
said they only need two weeks for this task, but they’ll really take five”). This is a mistake. If
you consistently mistrust the estimates coming from the group, the people making those
estimates will very quickly catch on and begin to meet your expectations. If your team really
does have a problem estimating, that’s a problem that should be dealt with and corrected
through tracking the schedule variance and other metrics in the same way you would track
any employee on your team who has such problems (see Chapter 4).

Maintain Your Own Project Schedule
Giving up control of the schedule is a common mistake. It allows project managers, who
are responsible for the ultimate success or failure of their project, to maintain almost no
knowledge of how it is progressing or of who is doing what. It is your job to know why
things are slipping, and whether or not commitments will be met—and you can’t expect
to adequately understand the complexities of your project with just a couple of status
meetings. You must be an active participant in gathering knowledge about your project. In

order to find out how the work is progressing and understand the problems your project is
facing—which are necessary in order to make informed suggestions—you need to main-
tain your own project schedule.
Many project managers take a hands-off approach toward managing their outsourced
projects, when they would never take such a risk with projects developed in-house. And it
really is a huge risk; it means giving up a lot of control. Organizations of all types stretch
the truth to keep their clients happy, and outsourced vendors are no exception. Keeping
control of your project means verifying the status and the quality of the work product in
the exact same way you would on your in-house project team. Review the work through
both formal inspections and informal peer reviews (see the following section) to maintain
an active understanding of your project tasks and their progress. But above all, know who
is doing what and how far they have progressed.

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