There are known causes of failure in software projects many of which overlap with project failure in general. As there are two companies involved, a post-mortem

There are known causes of failure in software projects many of which overlap with project failure in general. As there are two companies involved, a post-mortem of failed projects must include problems on both sides. On the purchaser side: - poor specification is a major project for both internal and external projects - abdication of responsibility for resource appropriateness. Yes, you are responsible for ensuring the vendor's engineers are a good fit for your project. - failure to manage the project. PM of external resources is a specialized PM skill. - changing objectives: this flows from poor specs, and results in changing targets - communication failures: nuff said - no QA: Yes, you must quality check work of external vendors. It's amazing how often this basic step is skipped. On the vendor side: - everything above, plus - failure to include specification as a line item in budget - poor estimation - failure to align resources to task at hand - underbidding - inexperience in problem domain