IT PARTNER/OUTSOURCING MANAGER

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES TO ASSESS
PARTNER/OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

What is your challenge as you see it?

“Our challenges to managing across the ocean with our outsourcing partners is to communicate work requirements, get a commitment from them for delivery, and monitor the work being done, and to see if it gets done at the right time, for the right price, per commitment. Today, everyone at our end is independently communicating with multiple groups within a single outsourcing partner, and one group does not know other’s requirements. As an Outsourcing manager, I want to be able to oversee the flow of traffic between us and our outsourcing partners.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, I have a couple of IT people in my staff to help me with integrating data on a monthly basis. Their job is to pull in information from our vendor management system, our purchase order requisitioning system, and compare that with the execution data collected from IT project managers. For every outsourcing partner, we compile an “Outsourcing Performance Scorecard” that we discuss and call the outsourcing liaison manager, in case we run into any issues, with respect to compliance. On a normal basis, we meet every week, and decide what to do.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need an information hub– that sits in the middle of a two-way traffic between your IT organization, and outsourcing partners. You need to make sure all activities such as new projects, engineering changes as well as issues and hurdles – all flow through that interface bus. You need the “hub” or common interface to extract information about spend, execution, and changes in commitment and compliance reports are derived from it. You need the partner interface to feed and send information and alerts to all relevant parties, for decision support in a timely manner.

What does IT Partner/Outsourcing Hub do? (What are its features?)

IT Partner/Outsourcing Hub is a common conduit of information flow between IT project managers and outsourcing partners. Right from the opportunity stage, all information regarding work and spending estimates, and time schedules flow through the Hub. In addition, while projects are in progress, the status and work completion, issues, hurdles and dependencies are collected and converged in the IT Partner/Outsourcing Hub. IT Partner/Outsourcing Hub then filters every piece of information against “rules” – or delivery guidelines, compliance requirements and provides alerts and warnings both ways. IT Project managers are informed in time of the changes, and they can make decisions to adjust workload, reprioritize and reschedule in a timely manner.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

IT Partner/Outsourcing Hub is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.