Resources: Insourcing and Project Members

Resources

No matter how large the company and the project is, the team is almost never made up only of internal staff. So, although we can assume that the company has enough staff to not hire outside people, management will often find reasons why insourcing or outsourcing is required. When insourcing, individual external resources are contracted, often for the duration of the project. These external resources are always located on-site. When outsourcing, parts of the project are developed by a different company, usually off-site. Eventually, the company will do both insourcing and outsourcing.

Moreover, the problem often exists that staff members sometimes work on several projects in parallel. For example, they maintain an older system while developing another new system. This means that they are unable to devote all their time to the project.

All these different resource strategies can have a significant influence on the project. We’ll look at them in detail and make some recommendations.

Insourcing

It seems as if there are no large projects without external consultants. Although companies often claim that they want to get rid of them, they rarely do.