Regardless of the size of your organization or the project, your partner should help you nail down the end goal. Ask yourself the questions: Why is the project there in the first place? What will it accomplish for your company? The end goal must be 100% tangible.

This is the foundation of the house. Your partner ideally should include the primary use cases, actors and diagrams and accurately define the scope of the project.

Nowadays, the makeup of a project resources vary a great deal. Depending on the project size, some of the team members may wear different hats. Although this is acceptable for small projects, the need for a single accountable person for a project is an absolute necessity. In some cases, a senior account manager from your partner's organization can act as a strategic consultant, bringing a neutral, experienced perspective to your company. Augmenting what the project manager does, the senior account manager can help define where the project at hand fits in the bigger picture. In addition, a QA and Testing group, separate from the developers, is a sign of a mature vendor who can deliver quality results. Since many of the projects today involve the web, other resources may need to be considered such as security, user-interface/usability, art design, network, ISP, and storage.

Your partner should always keep the business needs in the forefront. It is easy to get mired in project details and lose sight of the end-goal. A good methodology with the proper checks and balances goes a long way. Mature software development organizations follow the guidelines of the Rational Unified Process® which has a set of defined phases such as inception, elaboration, construction, etc.

This is easier said than done. From the very beginning, the teams and the management must have a highly disciplined process for submitting, and approving changes. Good methodologies have a clear way of defining the business reasoning behind the submitted change request and force the teams to do a cost/benefit analysis. The process should be designed to let the business needs drive the changes and prioritize them accordingly. A good change management process should not slow down organizations but force them to examine why scope changes are necessary.