Taking The Teeth Out Of Outsourcing

Turning over mission critical parts of your software development to a contractor to take advantage of the outsourcing “craze” can lead to plenty of anxieties for a project manager. The very nature of being a project manager means you are a bit of a control freak. That is one of the best qualifications for the job because the company entrusts to you the task of seeing to it that every aspect of project development is covered and that no potential problems can creep up.

But when you outsource some of all of your software development, that control is compromised. Unless you have the rare situation of having the contractor on site, you may go for days with no contact from the contracting company or freelance developer. It’s easy to become anxious and with good reason. If that agency with whom you outsourced is having problems or is going off in the wrong direction with the project, you need to know it so you can provide the leadership that you are being paid to provide.

That anxiety is what keeps a lot of companies from outsourcing their work and the resistance of project leaders to let go of some of all of the development work can hold back the company from realizing the benefits of outsourcing. But working with a distributed team and having your project completed by multiple teams that are separated by time and distance is becoming more the norm as the internet permits us to pull together diverse talents from around the world to put at your company’s disposal. So we have to find ways to take the teeth out of outsourcing and develop some habits and systems to keep sufficient control that we are doing our jobs as project managers and still giving our remote developers the help and guidance they need as well as the freedom to create good software solutions for us.

How the relationship between the project sponsor and the contractor is structured will have a lot to do with whether the outsourcing agency has any liberty to take the project in the wrong direction or not. Now this is not to imply that contractors would intentionally not fulfill the mandates of the project specification. But misunderstandings may happen and if the specifications are difficult, it is not unheard of that contractors will try to find the path of least, and most inexpensive, resistance to find a solution. After all, from the contractor point of view, the faster they turn the project around and at the least cost, the greater their profit from the arrangement.

So it is on your shoulder at the project sponsor project leader to implement a strict schedule or milestones and module testing en route so the vendor can be tested to see if their work is on schedule and meeting specifications. The more you can modularize the work, the easier it will be to break up and outsource it section by section so the contractor’s success is documented and tested before moving into the next phase.

There are natural milestones within the project management method that allow you to step in and take a reading to determine if the project is on course. But even during the longest phase, the development phase, the work should be structured and phased to the contractor so there are natural milestones that allow for the project leader to step in and conduct code review, quality assurance audits and intermediate testing to assure that the work is being done according got specification and in line with the project scope document as well.

The team of outsourced contractors should be happy to work with a strong project plan that includes these check points. They should also be willing if not eager to participate in daily communications with you and with the staff developers with whom their work will interface to assure they are on track. Your success is their success and by building a genuine team culture during the project development, you and the contractor will be proud of a quality product in the end.