ADVISORY
By Ramadevi Lanka
India and Texas, USA
Synopsys
This article talks about project management challenges in the Team Extension outsourcing model and recommended solutions.
In a Team Extension model, the vendor project team becomes an extension of the customer project team. All the explanations and examples provided in this paper are taken from an IT (Information Technology) outsourcing experience. The problems and solutions presented here are looked at from a project management standpoint.
Impact on 3 project management knowledge areas is analyzed in this article – Communication Management, People Management, and Quality Management. Scope and Time management are subtly touched upon while talking about Quality Management.
Benefits
Reading this paper will give an insight into:
- project management nuances in the light of team extension and how these issues can be addressed
- how to recover projects (executed in team extension model) that are going through rough times
- the steps to take, while setting up team extension engagements, for achieving guaranteed success
Some of the solutions presented here are tried out during executing the projects and have resulted in project success. Understanding the issues and solutions presented here will alleviate problems faced in outsourcing engagements adopting team extension, will help a great deal in minimizing the teething problems while setting up extended teams and will enable moving towards more successful project executions.
Introduction
Team Extension is a type of outsourcing engagement model. This paper talks about some of the Project Management challenges which come up in team extension and recommends few solutions.
In a Team Extension (TE) model, vendor organization becomes an extended arm of the customer organization. Usually, team extension model will have geographically distributed teams. This model works on the principle of enabling the distributed teams to work in tandem, from multiple locations worldwide, to achieve a common goal.
In most cases, the Project Manager (PM) will be from the customer team. But there are also instances where the development team belongs to the customer and project management is outsourced to a service provider. Vendor and Service Providers are used interchangeably in this paper.
This paper is written for project managers who want to take up management of extended teams, managers who are part of the extended team, customers, and service providers who want to move towards team extension. Reading this paper will: give an insight into project management nuances looked in the light of team extension, help alleviate some of the issues faced in outsourcing engagements adopting team extension, provide tips on how to recover projects (executed in team extension model) which are going through rough times, help minimize the teething problems while setting up extended teams and in turn achieve successful engagements…
More…
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How to cite this article: Lanka, R. (2022). Project Management in Team Extension, PM World Journal, Vol. XI, Issue II, February. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/pmwj114-Feb2022-Lanka-project-management-in-team-extension.pdf
About the Author
Ramadevi Lanka
India and Texas, USA
Rama Lanka is an independent consultant with Ancla Technical Services in north Texas. She is a Program/Project/Quality Management professional with 20+ years of enriching work experience in the software industry. Her work execution is driven with a strong customer focus, quality focus, and business value realization focus. Known for Customer retention through on-time delivery of Projects / Programs meeting the requirements with expected quality, she is experienced in designing and delivering training programs, application & product testing, Enterprise Change Management, Software Delivery Centre setup & management for Global Enterprises. Rama enjoys giving back to the community by doing volunteering activities, mentoring, and sharing knowledge. Ms. Lanka can be contacted at Rama.Lanka@yahoo.com
