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How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us: Page 3 of 10

• An offshore technical manager supervised our project, as well as three others.

• A Life Time software manager coordinated his team with the on-site liaison to provide code reviews, database design and general advice.

• A manager in Life Time's real-estate division served as the business champion.

The project got off to a good start. The vendor's business analyst met frequently with the real-estate division's users and, with the on-site liaison, worked furiously to document all the functional and user interface requirements within four weeks.

By week three, however, our internal lead business analyst threw up a red flag. His review of the functional specs exposed problems in the requirements, particularly in the interface specs. For example, the UI as laid out forced the users to re-enter data they had previously entered. Plus, the screen flow was illogical and confusing. The on-site liaison countered that though the UI had problems, it ostensibly complied with the documented business requirements.