As the US economy dips lower and lower, businesses continue to explore outsourcing as a survival technique. But horror stories about failed outsourcing projects can deter even the most determined business owner.

The NY Times today published an article on “13 best practices for IT outsourcing” but I feel they missed the boat on some of the more ”operational” best practices for IT outsourcing:

So here are three more that I believe are very important:

1. Best practice #14: Don’t just communicate (as stated in # 6), be sure to communicate daily and at length. Ask pointed questions, ask them to repeat what you explained to make sure that they heard what you said and didn’t interprete it another way.
   
   
2. Best practice # 15: Manage scope, don’t just list objectives and retain responsibility, make sure that you manage scope. Suppliers too often agree to an increased scope to please a customer and customers too often ignore the impact of scope creep thinking they were insignificant. Next thing you know is that the project has missed most of it’s deliverables and scope creep that was never quite documented becomes a bone of contention between you and supplier.
   
   
3. Best practice # 16: Understand the culture of the country your supplier is from. Understand that a “yes” doesn’t always mean agreement and that cultural styles may prevent a supplier from challenging you when you impose unrealistic deadlines.
   
   

There are probably many other “operational” best practices that you may have encountered so feel free to list them here. Together we can make the NY Times list more operational…..

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