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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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