Defining relationships
- Treat outsourcing vendor contractors as you would your own employees in terms of respect and mistake management
- Develop local leaders who understand the corporate culture
- Obtain approval rights for vendor leadership personnel
- Locate contractors at your captive overseas locations
- Establish dedicated relationship managers on your team
Negotiating new terms
- Clearly define service expectations
- Expect contracts to need adjustment over time
- Keep it simple; avoid complex formulae for severity levels and escalation rules
- Frame renegotiation in terms that emphasise the benefit to the vendor
Key performance indicators
- Explain to business leaders that outsourcing requires more management oversight and planning than in-sourced service
- Don’t set key performance indicators (KPIs) for performance that can’t be measured
- Establish KPIs before creating service level agreements
- Include regional managers as early as possible in establishing performance requirements
- Develop a performance measurement process that does not force users to distinguish between outsourced and internally-provided service
Service level agreements
- Keep service level agreements (SLAs) to a minimum — if you didn’t track it before, you may not need to track it now
- Don’t create SLAs for every little thing Establish SLAs as a minimum expectation, not the optimal goal
- Don’t make SLAs technical and disconnected from the end result
- Expect to adjust SLAs as contracts change
- Try adjusting SLAs rather than renegotiating whole contracts
Source: CIO Executive Council
Read more in the CIO Australia outsourcing series
Part 1 - Top outsourcing countries and trends
Part 2 - Clients and incumbent vendors are renegotiating outsourcing deals before they expire
Part 4 - Negotiating contracts and maintaining relationships
Part 5 - Notes from the trenches
Also:
Nine ways to find hidden savings in your outsourcing invoice
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