Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
SLA Your Way to Outsourcing Success
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Outsourcing is such a headline-grabbing, emotive subject that it is easy to get quickly distracted by the rancorous argument and entrenched debate it often provokes. Because it directly impacts the livelihoods of stakeholders--both positively and negatively--outsourcing is more affective of stakeholder behavior than in other types of project.
Additionally, any latent tendencies toward disruptive behavior can become amplified when competing business line management sees an opportunity to advance partisan agendas. As a result, getting project participants to focus positively on the job at hand can be much more challenging than in other project environments.
But in dealing with the emotional context of outsourcing and navigating the minefield of conflicting stakeholder interests, we can lose sight of what drives the dynamic of an outsourcing project, that it is fundamentally a contracting arrangement.
As with any contract, outsourcing’s primary goal is to achieve a mutually beneficial reallocation, sharing or exchange of assets or services between contracting parties, where mutual benefit is expressed through financial rewards for both parties. It is so obvious that it hardly seems necessary to draw attention to this fact. However, this is where we need to focus our attention--as project managers--if we want to drive emotionalism out of our …
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"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams |