Deborah Kops

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Chutes and Ladders

Remember the childhood game Chutes and Ladders? Roll the dice and you move around the board. If you are lucky, you climb ladders and get to the finish line first. If luck runs out, your tile slides back to the starting point. Is there a parable here for effective stakeholder management when sourcing globally? Gambling […]
Deborah Kops
September 11, 2012
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Who’s Satisfied?

There are no industry standards for measuring customer satisfaction in the global services industry. In their absence, supposed discontent can take on epic proportions and all feedback can appear negative. Kops discusses elements of an approach that customers should aspire to implement According to an oft-quoted industry statistic of indeterminant attribution, approximately 80% of all […]
Deborah Kops
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Scaling the Heights: The Imperative to Grow Shared Services and Outsourcing

So you dragged your organization kicking and screaming through a few transitions to a shared services and/or outsourced business model, and now it’s time to spread the wealth to the rest of the organization.  You and your team might think that the next logical step is to focus inward, building up more process skills, identify opportunities […]
Deborah Kops
August 21, 2012
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By the Clock

When is the right time for sourcing of services? Is it when you are at the nadir of corporate fortunes or when profits are robust? Is it when your industry’s margins are squeezed, or when there are fundamental changes to your industry structure? Is there a clock to help us find direction? As a child […]
Deborah Kops
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Everything I Learned About Outsourcing I Learned in Kindergarten…but Forgot

The rules we grow up intuitively understanding eventually fade away into distant memories. The same principle applies to managing outsourcing deals Outsourcing successfully should be relatively straightforward if one follows a few simple rules. Wading through the marketing hype and the thrill of the deal, the pressures to demonstrate cost reduction and quality enhancement, one […]
Deborah Kops
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Fear of Unintended Consequences

Ever wonder why your CEO charters an exhaustive study of enterprise-wide sourcing potential, corralling resources to develop a business case that encompasses virtually every business function? Spends hours reviewing and posing questions? Gives you the kudos you rightfully deserve for pulling together a cogent assessment and compelling plan that saves the company millions of dollars/pounds/Euros […]
Deborah Kops
July 31, 2012
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How do you get them to eat sushi?

Lots of my friends think sushi is the ne plus ultra of nosh. Now I must confess I am not a big sushi fan, but I appreciate the presentation, and individually, I’ll eat most of the ingredients. It’s just the seaweed wrapper that’s a bit hard to swallow. Grappling with the sale of shared services […]
Deborah Kops
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Imperfect Arbitrage

The implications of generational shift resulting from the globalization of work by Deborah Kops The problem goes something like this. A young man from a country noted for outsourcing business processes is sitting with a veteran accounts payable accountant, putting the accountant’s tasks in a template in order to achieve so- called “knowledge transfer,” which is […]
Deborah Kops
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Where the boys are

Looking at any outsourcing provider or advisor’s website brings to mind the title of a 1950s song by Connie Francis. Click on “About Us,” then “Management Team,” and a bevy of good looking thirty- and forty-something guys in sharp suits will peer back at you. Occasionally, you’ll see the anomalous face of someone of the […]
Deborah Kops
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No Fun for the Soon Forgotten

Lest you think you’ve missed something in the title–the plot of Irish playwright Eugene O’Neill’s final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, has no relationship whatsoever to outsourcing or offshoring; the plot revolves around a washed up actor, and a scheme to buy land below market. The protagonists have much in common yet with a […]
Deborah Kops
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Changing to Innovate

  When the outsourcing industry pundits blithely tosses out the term “innovation,” we tend to think they are delusional. Since everyone agrees that outsourcing is geared to deliver positive changes in efficiency, productivity, cost and quality, what is “innovative” about outsourcing? Are we using a puffed-up word to pretend we’re getting or delivering more value? […]
Deborah Kops
July 18, 2012
Archive

Manage Outsourcing Change by Communicating Remorse

By Deborah Kops  Most of us have been down on our knees praying that the relationship does not blow up over an error. Perhaps the cutover was delayed because the provider did not conduct sufficient user acceptance tests, or an employee committed fraud within a client account because controls were inadequate, or the client did […]
Deborah Kops
January 18, 2011
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Make No Little Plans

After slogging through six years of architectural school, I took away several lessons for life, not the least of which came from Daniel Burnham. In 1909, Burnham, one of the most notable of American architects, published “The Plan of Chicago,” which laid out a strategy for the city’s long term development. He is famous for […]
Deborah Kops
January 14, 2011
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Starting Out on the Right Foot with Outsourcing Change Management

I recently read one of those elaborate corporate leadership books that was trying to boil down 300 pages of common sense into one list of 10 inspiring points. If you are like me, many of the business books you read either oversimplify a very complex problem, or attempt to restate the obvious in new jargon. […]
Deborah Kops
January 1, 2011
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Learn from Leaders

…our change challenge will become: can we change fast enough?Our newest case study content in “Learn from Leaders” features outsourcing and change management lessons from Simon Newton, VP-Shared Services, Kimberly-Clark Corporation. In an industry such as fast moving consumer goods—where margin is everything, it critical to keep pushing process and cost efficiency in order to […]
Deborah Kops
December 9, 2010
Archive

Outsourcing Change Management–Relationship Breakdown: It ain’t just culture

Excuse the excrable use of grammar to make a point. So much fault in outsourcing relationships is laid at the feet of what we call culture–the provider team do not know who the Yankees are, they don’t celebrate Christmas, they have too many holidays.  In other words, they just aren’t like us. And the latest NBC offering “Outsource” […]
Deborah Kops
November 9, 2010
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Sourcing Change partnering with HfS Research

HfS Research is the foremost advisory analyst firm and networking community, focused on helping enterprises make complex decisions with their business process and IT outsourcing strategies. With 36,000 subscribers to its research website and blog, HfS Research provides the most influential and frequently visited collaborative community platform in the global services industry, providing rapid and […]
Deborah Kops
November 3, 2010
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It’s (power)Pointless to manage outsourcing change

It boloxes me that companies think that the lingua franca of communication is PowerPoint, and that five succinct phrases on a well-laid out page will convince people to change their opinions, rearrange their loyalties, understand the issues and forge new relationships. Yet in the outsourcing and shared services world, almost nothing—from examining a business model […]
Deborah Kops
October 21, 2010
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Managing outsourcing and shared services: the end of faith-based management?

Outsourcing or offshoring require a radical adjustment in management style—from situational response to managing by fact; from keeping the team on the straight and narrow by walking around to living by governance structures that don’t come naturally; from calling Susie down the hall to formally logging and tracking a request; from communicating in “corporate speak” […]
Deborah Kops
September 30, 2010
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“Outsource”—friend or foe of outsourcing change management?

Anyone see Outsource last night? Turning outsourcing into comedy is one of American television’s attempts to dominate the Nielsen ratings. The formula appears to be this: take every Indian cliché in the book and pair it with an American counterpart—sort of sacred cows, ambitious and obsequious manager, Bollywood moves, singsong English, “Delhi belly,” shy ladies […]
Deborah Kops
September 25, 2010
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“It’s not my job to make my clients happy.”

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? […]
Deborah Kops
September 17, 2010
Archive

Why Oh Why Oh Why?

Why do companies implementing shared services and outsourcing first think about the term “change management” in the weeks before they go live with the new solution? Is it hubris (“they will do it and they will like it)? Limited awareness of the implications of what is changing? Discomfort with the so-called “soft stuff?” Haste to […]
Deborah Kops
September 14, 2010