Project tips

A year into network build-out touching 3,000 locations, Washington Mutual CIO Jerry Gross shares his advice

• Leverage, streamline, improve. Repeat.

• Don’t single-source anything, especially if you’re a large company.

• Create incentives and processes that ensure lots of intervendor cooperation with no finger-pointing or responsibility shirking.

• Measure performance at as many levels as possible; measure regularly to form the basis of ongoing vendor quality improvement processes.

• In your vendor contracts, insist on and provide very specific language in terms and conditions for contingencies such as bankruptcies, network failures and service mix.