Outsourcing Project Schedule
This is a practical guide to building a project schedule for an outsourcing project — the planned dates for performing activities and reaching milestones, adapted to the realities of outsourcing a function to an external provider.
What a Project Schedule is
A project schedule is the planned dates for performing activities and reaching milestones. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Project Scheduling. On an outsourcing project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Outsourcing project
Outsourcing projects live or die on outsourcing a function to an external provider. A well-built project schedule gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how outsourcing projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- Activity list
- Durations and dependencies
- Critical path
- Milestones
- Baseline dates
Outsourcing-specific considerations
Tailor the project schedule to the risks that most often derail outsourcing projects:
- Knowledge transfer
- Service-level definition
- People impact
Example
On a real outsourcing project, the project schedule would be shaped by outsourcing a function to an external provider. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — knowledge transfer, service-level definition, people impact — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.