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By Paula Gregorowicz
Every time I speak to someone new at various companies, it seems yet another web development project has gone to an outside vendor. As with most things, there are pros and cons to keeping design and development in-house versus contracting for services. Whether you outsource all or a portion of your Intranet development to: keep employee numbers low; tap expertise not available internally; augment staff for a big project; or some other reason, you need to take an active role to ensure the outsourcing arrangement works and yields the benefits you seek.
Just because you've survived the proposal process and hired someone to do the job doesn't mean that your work is done. If you want to make your outsourcing experience positive and yield all the ROI you seek, you need to take an active and systematic role in managing the vendor relationship.
Have a Process in Place
Do you have a strong process in place to manage your vendor relationship? There is more to it than the usual project management you'd follow to do a project internally. You have to do all that and then some.
At a minimum you need to know:
• When, with whom, and how often you will communicate.
• Exactly what work has been agreed to, what the cost will be, and how you will be billed.
• What person(s) on your team are responsible for managing the project and vendor relationship?
• How you will deal with any failures.
• To what degree you can view and inspect the vendor's work.
Communication
Perhaps the most important element in any business relationship is communication. I mean real communication, not just weekly meet and greets where everyone smiles and nods. While you relinquish the burden of staffing for a project when you outsource it, the price you pay is in the added time it takes for you to be vigilant with managing the vendor's activities.
Create a mutually agreeable schedule for communication and stick to it. Get clear on what information you need to have communicated to you in order for you to feel 100% confident that work is being performed as agreed, the project is on track, and any roadblocks are immediately and thoroughly addressed.
Do whatever it takes to stay on the same page in terms of what is being done and why. I've seen more than one instance where contractors were busy delivering apples for weeks when what was desired were oranges. It was not because the contractors were incompetent but rather because the lines of communication were superficial at best.
The most important thing is to develop an ongoing relationship and communication with the vendor that is consistent and not just limited to handling problems, renewing contracts, or paying the bill.
Scope of Work and Cost
While your vendor contract might have a ton of lingo in there, make sure you understand in plain English what work will be performed and how you will be billed for that work. Who hasn't been on the giving or receiving side of scope creep? Will the vendor be delivering a Lexus when you need a Civic?
The same confusion over scope can happen often even with internal projects; however the stakes are even higher if you have a vendor billing you at consultant rates for projects on a tight timeline (and what isn't on a tight timeline these days?). And, the account execs with whom you sealed the deal and built great relationships with are rarely the people you will see with any regularity during the course of your project. So, make sure you have a meeting of the minds with the folks who are working on the day to day.
Who Is Responsible?
Who on your team is primarily responsible for managing the project and vendor relationship? Many times the responsibility of managing contractors falls into the lap of a project manager who already has a slew of initiatives to deal with. This doesn't mean he or she can't also manage the vendor, but it does mean that there needs to be clear responsibilities and expectations of what that will look like.
Responsibility goes hand in hand with communication. It shouldn't be an afterthought. Proactive and ongoing relationship building is the key to making it all work to your benefit. A lot of times someone on the inside might be less than pleased that the company has chosen to outsource a portion of their job or the more interesting work. I've seen it happen all the time -- brilliant employees dying for an interesting project and then seeing that very development work being outsourced. It does little for morale. Yet, if it is the business decision you've chosen based on the bigger picture, it is your responsibility to ensure that people rally around the project and that one person has personal accountability for bridging the gap between contractors and employees working on the project.
Dealing with Failures
What happens if and when something breaks? How are things handled depending on whether a failure occurs in development or production? Who is responsible for ensuring you get to the root cause of the failure and make corrections so that it doesn't occur again?
Of course how you deal with failures will depend on whether the vendor is involved in ongoing support or whether the contract was for them to build, implement, and depart. Either way it is your business and it is critical that you have a clear process in place for addressing failures based on severity and impact.
Always remember to fix and address the problem; don't resort to blame. Blame serves no constructive purpose in any relationship, and this is no exception. Assign responsibility -- yes, blame -- no.
View and Inspect the Work
Sometimes you hire vendors for proprietary code and systems that are considered "black box" and your ability to dig behind the scenes to audit their work is limited. Whether your arrangement is wide open or limited, you need to inspect so you can ensure that you get what you expect.
Whether inspection looks like a formal audit or informal application and code review, make sure you take the time to kick the tires and look under the hood. You don't want to sign off a project as complete unless you are sully satisfied with the end result.
If you've build a proactive and constructive relationship with your vendor this piece of the puzzle will be a natural end result.
Conclusion
With outsourcing, hiring a vendor is not the end, but rather the start. You must take active responsibility in cultivating an ongoing positive, proactive, and open relationship full of real communication if you want to realize all the benefits and return on your investment.
Using her signature down-to-earth-plain-English approach to web technologies, Paula Gregorowicz works with small businesses so they are completely, authentically represented and "comfortable in their own skin" on the web. Go to www.paulagwebdesign.com
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