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If your project was done in-house, you would never let anyone keep the schedule for you.
The project schedule should be kept and updated by you just as you would keep it in your
organization. You should be notified immediately of any slippage, and hold regular sched-
ule reviews as well as event-driven reviews with your outsourced project team. Every-
thing in Chapter 4 applies to your outsourced project team, and it is your responsibility to
stay on top of it. If you don’t, the team will keep moving forward on their schedule, per-
haps toward their own goals, and will continue to bill you for their time, whether or not it
meets your needs.

Hold Reviews and Inspections
A review is one of the most important tools a project manager has for knowledge transfer,
and it is difficult to overstate the importance of reviews and inspections in an outsourced
project.
The more feedback you give, the more the team will understand what you want. One of the
most common causes for outsourced project failure is that the project manager does not
check the team’s work until major milestones are delivered. If the team misunderstands a
major work product and it is not inspected until the end of a project phase, the effort for that
entire phase could be wasted. Many of the most serious problems that plague outsourced
projects can be caught early with inspection and constant collaboration.
Unfortunately, reviews in outsourced projects can be highly time consuming; much more
so, in fact, than in an in-house project. In an in-house project, the team is already familiar
with that particular organization’s standards, and there are usually plenty of examples to
work from. The project manager doesn’t need to spend nearly as much time making sure
that the team understands the work being accomplished. What’s more, an in-house team
normally understands the mission of the organization and the needs of its users. Many
project managers take this for granted, and don’t think to communicate these things to the
vendor. It requires constant effort and vigilance on the part of the project manager to make
sure that the needs are properly understood when moving work outside the organization.

In addition to knowledge transfer, reviews are also important tools for collaboration. It is
important to encourage collaboration between the project team members at the vendor

and the team members within the organization. When an inspection team is made up of
people from both organizations, the only way for them to reach consensus on a work
product, in order to approve it, is to collaborate on identifying and fixing the defects in
that work product. After the inspection, everyone has a better understanding of the work
to be done, as well as of how everyone else thinks about that work.

At the outset of the project, you must figure out which work products need to be inspected.
You should add these inspections to the schedule as strategic milestones, to ensure that the
vendor is in the loop. However, it will often be too time consuming to inspect every work
product that you would in an in-house project, because inspections that span multiple orga-
nizations are much more effort-intensive than inspections that only involve people from a
single organization. It will take some practice and experimentation before you find the

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