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... 

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...