Daily meeting with outsourcing team, advisable or not?

As long as you do not participate in the Daily Scrum, there really is no harm in your attending. We have Product Owners attend our Scrums on a regular basis.  But you should be there for information and not to participate.  If you start trying to participate the Scrum Master should interfere and protect the Development Team from your interruptions. Also, you should not come away from the Scrum and then suggest that the team do things differently.  If you "expect the outsourcing company to work in agile way" then you should also work that way and allow the Development Team of the outsourcer to self-organize and self-manage their work. 

However, this is based on Scrum.  And since you posted this in the forums on scrum.org I am making the assumption that your "agile way" is Scrum.  But there is a whole lot of wiggle room in the phrase "work in an agile way".  If you aren't going to expect them to do Scrum according to what is explained/described in the Scrum Guide (https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html) then you aren't doing Scrum and it becomes up your organization and the outsourcing company to decide what you mean by "agile way". 

I expect the outsourcing company to work in agile way and I'm in charge of assessing their proposal and I will also be the main technical contact point in the project.

Do you expect them to be able to complete the work they plan into a Sprint without any further input from you? If not, can you be sure that you aren’t also a Development Team member?

@Daniel

about the "agile way": I don't think I can force pure agile methodology to the outsourcing company. They will garantee "of course we are agile" and I don't think I have the power to select the outsourcing company based on the strict agile requirements.

So I will have to deal with a pretend-to-be-agile team and I want to minimize the risks involved in a year long and difficult migration project. The minimum for me is sprint and daily meeting in order to stay up to date.

If the project is really a migration and not a total rewrite (which I don't want) the legacy system must be also adapted in some way. ex, using new interfaces, replacing modules etc.

Actually I want no only to listen but also to participate, because the legacy will be dealt with by the original team, not the new team.

I'm not sure what to expect from my request, and I understand that is a bit out of scope in strict SCRUM forum...but still...

@Ian

well, thinking about it, actually I would be considered as dev team member. 

If the project it's a refactoring and not a complete rewrite.

If it's a complete rewrite without even data migration, I don't see myself  with any future in the company, let alone the dev team

We are outsourcing the complete refactoring of our software. 

We expect architectural changes as well as functional and GUI changes in an incremental manner.

We obviously don't know your needs/requirements, but judging from the words you use, this doesn't seem like refactoring. A more suitable term would be restructuring. Throw in "with new functionalities", too :) Refactoring is actually something else.

I expect the outsourcing company to work in agile way and I'm in charge of assessing their proposal and I will also be the main technical contact point in the project.

Shouldn't there be a conversation between you and the outsourcing co? Shouldn't you both have as much transparency and understanding on the way work is going to be performed, checked/inspected, demo-ed, released to a dedicated environment, etc? How about support during and post completion? What metrics will you use to decide progress? Have you spent time at their offices? How many face 2 face conversations have you guys had? and so on

Should I require to participate in the daily meetings at least as a listener? 

It depends on whether you are a good fit to be the Product Owner (Manager? acting as a PO) in charge of maximising the value. Otherwise, find someone best fit for the role (PO, if a decision is reached to use Scrum as Agile framework) and keep constant touch with them (on a daily basis).

Your questions were addressed to a good forum. Most people here specialize in Scrum, which is just one of the many ways of working these days. You've already received good answers, keep asking and the community will surely advise.

@Mark it does sound like you are going to be doing some form of Agile and there are some Scrum principles/techniques that you can use.  Your desire for daily stand up and sprints is not a bad idea.  Since you won't be doing true Scrum, then you pretty much have free reign on how you want to modify the events.  Look into Kanban and their "running the board" event because that might actually be a closer fit to what you want. 

As for the Sprint, unless you plan to use the time box to incrementally deliver parts of the refactor it might not be necessary to include the Sprint Planning/Review/Retro events.  But if you do want to use Sprints as Scrum describes, then I highly suggest you also include the other events as described in the Scrum Guide (https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events) because it will actually help you to "guide" the contractor to the result you desire. 

I applaud your desire to use Agile methods and even if you aren't doing Scrum, taking parts of it is not a bad choice.  It is a framework that if not done wholly is not true Scrum but then Scrum does not provide complete guidance on all things on purpose.  So if we can borrow from Kanban, Lean, etc why can't you borrow from Scrum for your variation?

Good luck with this. 

Hey!

This post is really informative.

Yes, I think daily meetings with outsourcing team will help you to closely work with your team and break barriers often associated with outsourced projects.

Thanks :)

Hey,

Attending daily Scrum will help by:

Raising transparency and visibility on how team is progressing toward sprint goal. 

Development team will able to share if there are any impediments where you can help in removing or guiding team on how to remove those impediments 

Attending will also help in case team need some clarifications of the work team is doing currently.

But note i used word attending not participating :)  

Make sure your attendance should impact on development team openness and the way team structuring meeting :) , If that is the case then attending will effect team courage, focus, openness, commitment