IT Outsourcing Metrics: A Good Example of Management Controls
Nick Krym of Pragmatic Outsourcing Provides a Great Example of IT Service Levels In the world of Service Level Agreements and IT outsourcing, contractual metrics are difficult to conjure because the work is intangible, with the exception of uptime, help desk/desk side services, and application development milestones. However, metrics are the dashboard by which effective vendor managers can effectively manage outsourcing vendors. Today, Nick Krym...
Transformational Metrics: Governing Outsourcing’s Lure
Note from the Author: Today’s article is part four in a series of articles discussing outsourcing metrics. We encourage your to read our other three articles: An Overview on Outsourcing Metrics, Operational Metrics, and Key Performance Indicators. Sustainable, successful outsourcing is all about leveraging other companies’ core competencies. Despite the labor arbitrage low cost country sourcing provides or the abundant availability...
Outsourcing Metrics: Key Performance Indicators
Good outsourcing contracts contain service level agreements, which define performance parameters of the services companies procure from their vendors. In previous popular articles, we addressed the general structure of Outsourcing Vendor Metrics and provided more detailed information on Operational Service Levels and Metrics. However, operations are data rich environments with a multitude of metrics that an experienced vendor manager could use to...
More on Outsourcing Vendor Metrics: Operational Metrics
With increasingly complex vendor management programs and more interest in developing outsourcing and services relationships, it is no surprise that measuring vendor performance is an increasingly important topic on vendor management executives’ agendas. We previously wrote a very popular article on Outsourcing Vendor Metrics. Our readers have provided plenty of positive feedback via email. Overwhelmingly, vendor managers have asked for more...
Outsourcing Vendor Metrics
Vendor managers often are overwhelmed with metrics, but these metrics do not always give a complete picture of the outsourcing vendor’s operations. We’ve mentioned a variety of metrics to date, and today we’re focusing on the major categories of metrics vendor management teams should focus on. In short, there are operational service level metrics, key performance indicators, and transformational metrics. Read More →
Vendor Inventory Metrics
Business process outsourcing contracts are often strong on quality and turnaround time metrics. The reason is simple: most back office operations focus on these two metrics and then grind their internal operations staff through mandatory overtime periods to work through excess inventories. Vendors, on the other hand, will charge for overtime, will resist excessive overtime to avoid expensive attrition, and will manage inventories unevenly –...
Top Ten Service Level Agreement Considerations
Here are our top ten considerations for authors and managers of service level agreements (SLAs): MECE – SLAs should be Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive (MECE). By this, no two SLAs should measure the same thing, and there should be a SLA for every important aspect of the program. Too often we see SLAs that overlap, creating double jeopardy situations and misleading positive or negative performance reports. In addition, we often...
