Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider

Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider: How to Unleash the Full Potential of Your Global Workforce teaches executives and managers of organizations that are outsourcing some or all of their IT services and/or IT-enabled business processes how to unleash the full potential of their outsourced workforce safely and profitably. Drawing on two decades of experience managing client relationships for global IT services companies, Venkatesh Upadrista expertly guides outsourcing organizations around the hazards of geographic distance, linguistic miscommunication, organizational mismatch, and functional disparity between receiver requirements and provider capabilities.

The first half of the book describes what an outsourcing organization needs to know about the IT services providers industry in general to deal intelligently with specific providers: namely, the industry’s organizational types, strategic drivers, competitive labor market constraints, and tactics for hitting P&L targets. The second half of the book teaches outsourcers how to evaluate prospective providers, craft service level agreements, formalize best practices, and manage the full gamut of receiver─provider relationships to optimize outcome in terms of cost, timeliness, and quality of services received.

The descriptions and prescriptions in Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider apply equally to onshore and offshore outsourcing, but examples and case studies focus on offshoring. In addition, Upadrista analyzes the advantages, disadvantages, and special considerations and caveats of single provider outsourcing and captive centers.

Table of Contents

PART I: Understanding the Outsourced IT Service Provider Industry
Chapter 1: The Organization of IT Service Providers
Chapter 2: The Profit-and-Loss Constraints on IT Services Provider Organizations
Chapter 3: IT Service Provider Organizations’ Tactics and Tricks for Hitting P&L Targets
Chapter 4: The Operational Parameters of IT Service Providers

PART II: Unleashing the Full Potential of Your IT Service Providers
Chapter 5: The Organization of IT Service Receivers
Chapter 6: Selecting Your IT Service Provider
Chapter 7: Understanding Your IT Service Provider
Chapter 8: Mapping and Managing Your Service Providers
Chapter 9: Captive Center Management
Chapter 10: Exit-Plan Testing
Chapter 11: Opting for a Single IT Service Provider