Last week saw the first anniversary of signing a big IT outsourcing contract between a client and the outsourcer. Having spent the first part of my career as an outsourcer and now, as a consultant, helping clients put outsourcing agreements in place, these anniversaries are becoming a regular occurrence.
Having worked together for a year, the team - that's the outsourcer's delivery group and the client's retained organisation - decided that dinner was in order. Outsourcing, one could argue, is akin to a marriage, and the evening was not unlike my anniversary celebrations: we talked about fabulous days in the year, laughed uncomfortably about awful moments, and couldn't remember much about everyday life as usual.
Having said "awful moments," it strikes me that it is generally not the big things that cause the majority of issues for any relationship, but the minutiae. Discovering at the weekly governance meeting that a basic update remains outstanding is a pain. The business unit that made the request is unhappy and, to be candid, there's not much you can do about it.
Frustration and the occasional bout of screaming are an option but unless you decided to build a contract that measures every tiny infraction (something regretted by many that tried) then you have to rely on goodwill and a good relationship. By contrast, a struggling security initiative, designed to prevent unauthorised access, was addressed quick-smart by the outsourcer.
This project accelerated, delivering just in time to meet regulatory requirements - a feat that probably couldn't have been accomplished internally. Which made me ask, what is it that makes small stuff so hard to deliver? At this point I fear my wife will read this and display it boldly on the fridge door, together with a list of "small" jobs.
A cynic might conclude the big project had real visibility through the whole client organisation, offering opportunities for the outsourcer to shine and to create further sales revenues.
It is not that the small stuff is hard, simply that it had no upside and would still be there tomorrow. But is that outcome really so different from what would happen with an internally delivered service? A business critical project gets attention and small stuff is overlooked.
It is just that in an outsourced environment, where the retained organisation is managing the performance of the outsourcer, they are more conscious of the day-to-day operations.
The client's head of service delivery and I agreed; the real challenge with small stuff is not to let it eat away at you or the team, to the point where it starts to destroy the overall relationship - like a marriage; you have to work at it.
In this instance, the client smartened up its act, getting jobs done that had lingered in the background for years. Delivery was not as efficient as everyone expected but there were real cost savings, although some of the senior management team are still not sure why they had to put 10 per cent of them aside as a contingency. The CFO says to leave them wondering for now.
The outsourcer worked hard to understand the dynamics of the environment, accepting that there are no prizes for delivering what was agreed in the contract. They haven't mastered proactively bringing cost saving to the table but we keep it on the governance meeting minutes just in case.
On balance, outsourcing is working and both get value from the relationship. Perhaps next year, instead of focusing on the highs and lows, we talk about each other's annoying little habits and promise to try hard not doing them - apparently it works wonders for a marriage.
