The Short List - Our recommendations.

A look at the many stripes of the outsourcing players

Criteria for sizing up an outsourcer How to manage your outsourcers

Dwight Rodgers
Project officer at the Environmental Protection Agency:

''Maintain the size of contractor staff and skill sets in a pretty steady configuration.'' Outsourcing contractors, just like in-house people, tend to be less motivated if they are thinking they may soon be out of work, he says.

Furthermore, by giving vendors enough advance warning of an impending dip or jump in job requirements, the EPA has enlisted their cooperation in ''smoothing the workflow out, so the contractor feels it can rely on a steady stream of assignments,'' he says.

Bruce Raynor
Project manager for EDS Blue Cross/Blue Shield project

''Incorporate outsourcing staff into the organizational structure. If the work is a key part of your business strategy, then you should include the vendor in management decisions. Some of our customers even include an [EDS] representative on their executive team.''

Peter Bendor-Samuel
President of Everest Software, a Dallas-based consultaing and software company:

Avoid giving mixed signals. ''Outsourcing is driven by everyone in a corporation,'' so the outsourcer can get ''conflicting, confusing instructions'' from different users, he says. ''You need to put things under central control,'' he says. ''If [outsourcers] intuitively recognize no one is managing this sucker, they'll behave accordingly.''

Wayne Bester
Manager of IT for Amoco Canada

Don't nitpick. Amoco Canada project managers kept disagreeing with MCI Systemhouse contractors over whether a series of small jobs were inside or outside the scope of the project.

Rather than continue to waste everybody's time, he offered to pay the vendor an extra $5,000 to $10,000 a month ''if they would do everything we asked, instead of spending all this time arguing about nickel-and-dime stuff.''