The International Community for Project Managers (ICPM)

Part 1 of this article has already received more industry attention than I have expected. I’ve seen it has been referred in some discussions, forums and even in twitter and FB many times. Now it has been published in ICPM where it meant to be.

This is the 2nd article of the series. In this article I’m going to discuss the tiers of outsourcing.
When you initiate an outsourced project as the outsourcee, or when making the decision to outsource a project as the outsourcer it’s very important to understand which tier of outsourcing you are in to. This will give you some intelligence in advance about these extra issues you may face in outsourced projects compared to collocated projects. I can think of many dimensions of outsourcing when I define the tires.. But following categorization based on geography – distance and time zones simply help me to understand many common positive and negative risks of such projects in each context.

Its again Winter in North.. So we are busy here at Exilesoft, Sri Lanka with most the customers who visit us. That's one nice thing in offshore business, as much as we enjoy travelling Europe, it seems our customers have found a second home to come when the winter starts in their countries. This is an ideal time we get to work together again as collocated teams. For them its quite exiting to work with us as well as to extend their business trip for one week or so to have little relax time in this exotic Island, explore the culture and have a better understanding and stronger bonding between the customer and development teams. Altogether it’s an awesome experience for both the parties. I too enjoy such visits of our customers a lot.

The concept of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is not new, but the concept of a comprehensive BPO is. The comprehensive BPO has gained importance in all of the Fortune 500 companies’ HR departments. Outsourcing multiple HR processes to a single vendor represents a business decision that is already in practice in contract manufacturing, logistics, engineering design, call centers, telemarketing, accounting, and other business processes. HR functions are critical to all Global 500 companies, but are not their core competency. The HR BPO reduces costs and capital investment in HR significantly.

Outsourcing of project work is more common today than ever. However, even though you outsource the work, you cannot completely outsource your obligation to make sure the project is progressing smoothly. If all goes well with the outsourcer, you do not have much work to do. Unfortunately, in many instances, the outsourcing vendor does not perform against expectations. If that happens, you want to know about it as soon as possible. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that your company has outsourced a project, or a portion of a project. Your company has also asked you to manage the relationship to ensure the vendor performs as expected.