Outsourcing

CPM Outsourcing Project Management: Concerns, Advantages, and Our Approach

When working with an outsourced project, a project manager needs to focus on dozens of issues simultaneously. They need to facilitate the project remotely, ensure efficient communication, and keep an eye on project resource use. Headhunting and keeping such an experienced and skilled employee in-house may be challenging and costly, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

Hiring an outsourced CPM Project Manager (PM) as part of your team is a great alternative to establishing in-house project management. An outsourced CPM PM can improve team management, ensure a transparent development process, reduce your budget, and bring many more valuable benefits.

As “One stop shop” Project Management service provider, CPM showcase the benefits of having an experienced PM on the project side, bringing leadership to your team and share professional approach to Project Management and Strategy Execution. 

CPM Outsourcing Project Management: 6 major concerns and ways we address them

Outsourcing Project management has become an integral part of strategic execution by projects since it provides companies with numerous benefits: 

• Access to a wide talent pool and niche expertise
• Fast augmentation of an in-house development team
• Cost savings

However, not everyone believes that hiring an outsourced project manager along with the development team can bring as many benefits as an in-house project manager. Usually, customers have such concerns of outsourcing project management:

1. Lack of operational control. Control over day-to-day project activities is what a customer delegates to an outsourced project manager. Some customers believe this may result in losing their authority over the development process, decisions made on the project, and, ultimately, the project’s outcome.
   How do we mitigate it? PMs at CPM do have more control over the development team than the customer does, which allows them to ensure that developers work to the best of their abilities. However, we always keep our customers updated on the project status and discuss critical decisions (development methodology, choice of technology, sprint goals, etc.) with them. Mostly, our PMs do this by producing daily or weekly status reports, facilitating regular online standups, and writing follow-up emails.
2. Poor quality of the final product. Each company has its own approach and quality standards for product development. When outsourcing a project, it can be challenging to make sure a contractor is working to those standards and that the final product will meet all of the customer’s needs.
   How do we mitigate it? At CPM, we have strict internal standards that help us build products of the highest quality. Second, during the project discovery phase, our business analysts and PMs elicit customer requirements to define the product’s goals and functionality. Thus, we ensure that the final product will meet all of the customer’s needs, expectations, and standards.
3. Lack of data security and confidentiality. A customer may consider providing confidential information on their project to a third-party PM insecure and consider that data to no longer be confidential.
   How do we mitigate it? While working on projects, our PMs follow security best practices: they sign non-disclosure agreements, use secure credentials to access customers’ resources, audit the security of data forms and APIs, etc. We can perform a security audit on demand or involve an authorized third-party organization to do so to prove that we’re working to the highest security standards.
4. Low level of involvement in the customer’s business. In-house project managers usually know all the details of a customer’s business and industry that are relevant to the project. Outsourced PMs need a considerable amount of time to figure all that out. If they don’t research the customer’s business thoroughly, they can overlook industry standards, valuable stakeholders, etc.
   How do we mitigate it? At CPM, we have extensive experience delivering projects of various sizes to customers in various industries and countries. We generally assign PMs that have relevant knowledge and experience for particular projects. Also, our PMs constantly exchange experience and knowledge, which helps them be prepared for any challenge. If one PM has never worked with a particular type of business, they can always ask for advice from colleagues.
5. Challenging communication. Outsourcing is often associated with communication issues related to time zone differences, cultural particularities, language, etc. Since a PM is the key communicator between the outsourced team, stakeholders, and in-house developers, challenges in interacting with them can affect the whole project.
   How do we mitigate it? Our PMs negotiate specific time frames and communication channels convenient for both the customer’s team and the outsourced team. Vast experience working with customers from around the world has taught us to be flexible and adapt to any conditions.
6. Additional costs. From the customer’s perspective, a PM may not appear as important as software developers — especially if the customer has in-house PMs with the same set of skills. In this case, hiring an outsourced PM may seem like an unreasonable project cost.
   How do we mitigate it? In our experience, hiring an outsourced PM saves a project’s budget in the long run. We’ve seen our PMs successfully mitigate risks of miscommunication, unclosed requirement gaps, and insufficient risk analysis. Also, good knowledge of the team allows our PMs to efficiently manage team resources and detect issues faster than a customer’s in-house PMs usually do.

As a Project Management outsourcing company, CPM has extensive experience providing project managers to our customers as part of our core offer. We believe that team management on the side of the outsourcing provider is beneficial for both the provider and the customer. Now let’s find out how exactly an outsourced PM can facilitate your project and strategy execution. Contact us here for more details  smigicm@cpm.rs