Facilities Check List
Practical, step-by-step guides for the busy FM
November 2000
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Team Leadership
Outsourcing has been used by facilities departments for many years to manage projects. For most of this time, outsourcing hasbeen used to provide technical capabilities not available in-house and to supplement scant in-house resources with additionalstaff for large projects. However, outsourcing team leadership has been widely practiced only recently.
This practice has arisen along with a trend toward increased facilities outsourcing in general. It is an effective alternative insituations such as these:
- Relatively self-contained projects with well-defined scopes of work.
- Highly specialized work, such as asbestos abatement or environmental cleanup.
- Large-scale work that requires full-time attention no one on staff can provide.
Outsourced leadership also has inherent drawbacks:
- An outsourced project manager’s loyalties ultimately depend on the fortunes of his or her employer, not yourcompany.
- An outsourced person’s motivations are fundamentally different. While they may be dedicated to achievingproject goals, they cannot be expected to appreciate the full impact of the corporate goals the project is designed tosupport.
- In-house team members may not communicate the same amount and quality of information that they would toan in-house team leader.
- Duties and responsibilities of the team leader require very careful definition in the project managementcontract.
- An outsourced person may have far less latitude than an in-house manager would have.
- Any team leader will require a significant learning curve to become fully acquainted with the corporate cultureand style before he or she can function fully and effectively.
This installment of FM Check List is adapted from BOMI Institute’s Facilities Planning and Project Management,(www.bomi-edu.org/13051.html), a course in BOMI Institute’s Facilities Property Administrator (FMA) program.
