How to Make Outsourcing Work

By Sean C. Barker

August 27, 2007 12:00 PM ET

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4 Take responsibility for requirements. Incomplete or misunderstood requirements can send outsourcing over budget or completely over the edge. You know your business better than the outsourcer ever will, so its up to you to gather requirements from your business perspective and explain them to the outsourcer. This will help ensure that your needs are well understood and documented, and it will help to educate the outsourcer about your business.

5 Review regularly. As you would with any internal department, review the status of both the operational infrastructure and the application development on a regular basis. Combine a monthly review with clear measures to indicate progress or problems with a quarterly review of the relationship. Some key measures are labor usage (capital vs. expense), project and budget status, ticket statistics, incidents with business impact and customer satisfaction.

Remember, an outsourcing deal, if managed correctly, can be good for all parties.

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Barker is the vice president for worldwide operations at a global Fortune 100 company. Contact him at sean_ barker@yahoo.com.

Read more about management in Computerworld's Management Knowledge Center.

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