Lesley Michaelis's blog

The Dreaded Exit Plan Review!

You can hear it now – “We need to review the Exit Plan” and everyone suddenly has a more pressing meeting to go too.  Perhaps the reason for this reluctance to review the plan is that it is immature and lacks credibility yet isn’t seen as a problem.  Exit is one of the key risk areas around outsourcing and it is important to spend time and effort to understand and manage the risk. When you have actually been involved in a number of exits, have learned lessons and seen the difficulties that organisations face from a commercial and service perspective, you will appreciate that this is not an area to be ignored.

The future of IT delivery in an increasingly digital and automated world will become dependent on highly efficient and flexible sourcing. The model will need to flex over time and adapt to the emerging disruptors in the IT and business environments. This will mean that your Supplier Relationship model will have to adapt to accommodate these changes.

An effective Supplier Relationship model should enable you to:

It is a common thread to many conversations we have with clients about the frustration in their outsourcing relationships of lack and transparency – the black box concept and how the Suppliers they are working with are reluctant to provide transparency of costings.

This common problem typically relates to a concern regarding overall openness and trust.  This is coupled with changing expectations in the marketplace as to what is “Best in Class” and what clients can expect to be shared and the benefits realised by both parties from an open and transparent relationship.

Recently, we have seen more and more requests to assist with transition projects particularly around managing the change for the customer but also about ensuring the quality of the Supplier delivery and ensuring that the transition delivers a robust firm foundation for delivery.  As with anything handed over to a third party and not checked for quality, without a QA Manager continuously monitoring the transition process, it leaves the project susceptible to overrun, for costs to increase and the possibility that the transition will not deliver the benefits that were initially expected.

“In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”
- Charles Darwin

For me, this great quote describes some of the basic ways of working aligned to agile.