The folks at Marriott International Inc. are betting that they know the answer, and it may be simpler than you think. "An overriding principle at Marriott is that how we run an outsourced project and how we run an insourced project is the same," says Howard Melnick, senior vice president of information resources application services.

The Bethesda, Md.-based hotel management company has developed a set of project management processes to assign and track all project tasks and standardize metrics and reporting, regardless of who does the actual work.

A case in point is OCEANS (One Corporate Enterprise Advanced New-world System), a multiyear, multi-million-dollar project to transform Marriott's long-standing practice of managing finance and accounting processes at the hotel level. The multiphased initiative will ultimately deliver a single, worldwide financial overview using a unified, scalable application architecture and PeopleSoft and Oracle financial software. Accenture Ltd. provides most of the IT services.

Marriott doesn't see outsourcing as a way to cut costs or get rid of a problem. It's a way to add temporary expert staff and save time on a project like OCEANS, "where I need 100 people, but I won't need them forever," says Melnick.

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