Marriott's integrated view of the outsourcer's role eschews the conventional wisdom of budgeting x percent of a project's funds for outsourcer management. "We don't think of it as a straight percentage," Melnick says. "We think of it more as, 'Do we have the right roles covered?' "

Having the roles covered is shorthand for what's at the heart of Marriott's project management process: accountability. The company's understanding of what accountability means and its processes to ensure it allow the outsourcer to be integrated seamlessly into the project.

Accountability starts with an end-to-end project plan from business case to postmortem, and the outsourcer is intimately involved. "You need to bring in the outsourcer as early as you can to help build out the project plan," Melnick says. That plan includes components from technology to training and change management, "because you could have the technology work perfectly and not get the benefits," he adds.

Then the planners dive down into specific tasks where accountability is assigned, confirmed and monitored through a simple spreadsheet called the RACI (short for "responsible, accountable, consult, inform") document. Marriott sees those as the key roles in any project. In the course of planning, Petty, Cullen and Shelton consider each task and determine who will ultimately be accountable for getting it done, who will be responsible for actually doing it, who must be consulted along the way and who needs to be informed about it. This prevents internecine squabbling and finger-pointing and makes it far less likely that toes will be stepped on or that tasks will slip in the course of the work. "It's a way of thinking," Melnick says. "We're used to working in this way, and it clears up a lot of misunderstandings."

Standards