The Untractable and the Unforeseen

Critical Risks in Outsourced IT Projects

Untractable Risks are those risks that resist mitigating actions, and still impact the project despite the manager's best effots to address them at the start.

• Schedule and budget management
• vendor staffing issues
• difficulties arising from the newness of technology

Approach to address these issues:
Both parties should consider pre-partnering arrangements to develop detailed requirements specifications before entering into an implementation contract.
The best approach would be: To separate the requirements specification part of pre-sales work into a standalone, chargeable consulting activity.

Unforseen risks are typically overlooked or simply don;t seem likely to happen at the risk assessment stage, so that no action is taken to mitigate them. Both intractalbe and success even on projects that are subjected to a rigorous pre-project risk assessment.

• Client Relationship Problems-its intangible nature makes it difficult to quantify and assess. "It's almost like marriage, it starts off very, very happy, everybody has a rosy picture about what's coming down the pike..."
  

Project managers would be well advised to pay attention to relationship issues both with their clients and within their own team at the start of the project.
Educating the clients to have a realistic exceptation of how the project will progress is a key strategy for vendor project managers.