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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.

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.

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