While outsourcing the projects to offshore is typically a management decision, making it successful is more then often left to the execution team. The execution should establish strong policies and procedures for project monitoring and control to ensure that the distant team is integrated into their organization. There need to be mechanism for:
Progress Reporting / Checkpoints – Vendor should be requested to provide periodical progress report, in an agreed format, to the client point of contact. The report should contain periodical progress, status against plan, variance (if any) and areas of concern. This can be automated using KPI dash-boards, report cards. The periodicity of the reporting mechanism should be determined based on the length of project / program as well the phase of the project.
Communication – Vendor should be asked to establish the communication channels, roles and responsibilities and escalation path clearly as part of the program management model. The program management model should define the periodicity of the communication at different levels – project team, program management, steering committee level as well as project sponsor level. There should be regular communication between the on-site and offshore teams taking place via a combination of the channels like conference calls, reviews, discussions over video conference and regular communication over electronic mails
Status Reviews and Feedback – Regular project reviews needs to be carried out with the vendor as per agreed format. Meeting should be held periodically offshore to list down the issues related to the project, status of development, issues of concern, etc. There should be mechanism set for project status reports, milestone reviews for the project etc to be sent regularly in the pre-defined formats. The review mechanism and formats must be defined during the planning and transition phase of the work in the outsourcing relationship.
Change Control- There should be an exclusive mechanism for change control. Change requests which are reality should be evaluated and mutually agreed. The effort and costs must then be incorporate as regards to these change requests. During the discussion on change requests both parties should act mature and it should be a fair discussion rather then a way to get leverage from either party.
Standards- Vendor should come up with well-documented set of standards and procedures to handle various tasks in software development and project management for the offshore activities. These standards and procedures need to be followed during the project execution.
Filed under: Application Outsourcing, Consulting | Tagged: IT Outsourcing, project management, Software Development
