Who we are:
The Project Management Institute (PMI®) Service & Outsourcing Specific Interest Group is an incorporated, non-profit affiliate of PMI that supports and sponsors professional development of program managers, project managers, project leaders, project liaisons and project teams working on both sides of Service and/or Outsourcing engagement. The purpose of the Project Management Institute is to build professionalism in project management™. The Institute is widely recognized as a global leader and an advocate of change, evolution and innovation in the art and science of managing programs and projects. Today, PMI has over 80,000 participants and continues to experience phenomenal growth in membership.
The PMI Service & Outsourcing SIG received its charter and was officially recognized as a global component by PMI headquarters in March 1998. The SIG membership is globally diverse with members from six continents.
What are Service & Outsourcing Projects?
As Organizations strive to achieve their business objectives, they often find it advantageous to contract for necessary, but not core competency, functions with others. This has given rise to Service and Outsourcing projects (S&O) that place unique demands on project managers and a need for enhanced project management tools.
So what's different about service projects? And, what is meant by service projects? Service projects can be thought of as those of project classes where the Customer contracts with another for work that is not a product but is a Service. In the past, this is typically been such things as maintenance and cleaning. The definition does not include service activities like contracting for a design or component of a larger product because these activities will have the standard project attributes of well defined budgets and ending criteria.
In recent years some of the service projects have become very large. This has occurred when major corporations have examined their core competencies and benchmarked these and other of their operations. The result has been that some of these corporations have seen an advantage for contracting for services to perform operations that were not a core competency and better performed by an appropriate contractor. These have generally been called "Outsourcing". These projects are called "Outsourcing" especially when assets are transferred from the Customer to the Contractor.