“It’s not my job to make my clients happy.”

By September 17, 2010April 12th, 2021Archive

Think about what drives outsourcing and shared services adoption–cost reduction. If a program or account manager is meeting all his SLAs, and this year’s cost is less than last year’s, he gets a gold star. And his partner on the provider side gets his gold star if he is meeting margin. What is wrong with this picture?

The internal client–the one who is occupying the seats, or whose bill is being paid, or whose application should be up and running–gets lost in the constellation of stars. If he makes a little noise, that is a small price to pay in order to show good downward movement on his budget scorecard. And looking at the business case or the statement of work, effectivelychanging the way the client worked was not part of the report card.

No wonder internal clients are dissatisfied. In the compact between provider and sponsoring function, they do not feature into the equation. How do smart sourcing organizations change the math through change management?

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