Managing Outsourced Project: Ten Challenges You Must Learn to Tackle

Over the years, as the outsourcing industry has matured, many aspects of the outsourcing model have improved. Despite this, every year countless projects fail because project managers lack the proper training on outsourcing methods. Studies show that this is one of the major reasons that outsourced projects fail, yet it is often ignored. Project managers must understand their organization's motivation for outsourcing, decide strategically what to outsource and select outsourcing vendor after considering all the critical factors. Project managers need to blend outsourcing team with their own team by briefing their team on the importance of outsourcing to their company so that their team does not see the outsourced team as an appendage, or else, worst yet, a threat. An attitude of respect toward the outsourced teams must be instilled. Project managers needs to be trained to deal with the myriad of problems that arise when the workforce is in a different country and a different time zone including cultural differences. communication issues, long working hours, frequent surprises, cost overruns, and often wrong expectations. They must look into leveraging diversity and time differences. If not managed effective, productivity drops due to these challenges can cause project to fail.