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In this economically challenging time, I'm finding that my clients' service delivery managers are on the front lines having difficult discussions. Their companies are asking for base services from their service providers to be maintained, often with smaller overall services budgets than before the recession hit. These reduced budgets make conversations with service providers painful and become a challenge at the service delivery level when providers simply refuse to deliver the base contracted services.
This is where a strong governance process really helps the service delivery team. These people often will try to take the burden of negotiating these matters into their own hands – though they shouldn't. While I think that issues should be solved at the correct level, matters of policy or basic service delivery simply can't be negotiated outside of an executive process. My advice to teams with this kind of problem is to escalate and refuse to engage in the discussion with their service provider counterparts. It's not a failure to ask for help. To maintain a good outsourcing relationship it is essential to have a governance escalation path that everyone understands, provides clear lines of decision-making and authority, and is immediately responsive to problems.
How do you deal with this in your world? Can your service delivery team get immediate escalation for these types of problems? Are you seeing this discussion in your relationship? I’d love to hear how you are solving the problem, and in a day or so I will talk some more about the challenges of the service delivery team, and how companies I work with are meeting the need to continuously growing their ability and knowledge about good outsourcing management practice.
Cynthia Batty, Global Competency Lead, Service Management, TPI
consider the source
Posted March 11, 2009
Categories:
General
Outsourcing
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