Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider: How to Unleash the Full Potential of Your Global Workforce

Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider teaches executives and managers of organizations how to unleash the full potential of their outsourced IT services workforce and IT-enabled business processes safely and profitably. Drawing on two decades of experience managing client relationships for global IT services companies, Venkatesh Upadrista 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fs 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„Ÿprovider 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.

What youfll learn

Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider will show IT services receivers how to excel in the following areas:

• Gauging the suitability of your prospective providerfs business knowledge
• Engaging and managing the service delivery interfaces at the various staff levels of your providerfs organization
• Extracting full value, efficiency, and prioritization from the various divisions of your IT services provider using a mixed team operating model
• Setting your financial targets and control your costs for maximum ROI
• Crafting, negotiating, and enforcing SLAs that define appropriate service parameters, KPIs, and penalties and oblige your provider to innovate and to accommodate changes in your business processes
• Recognizing and minimizing risks such as vendor lock-in, breach of confidentiality, IP transfer, and key employee attrition

Who this book is for

Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider is designed for executives and managers of organizations outsourcing their IT services, including CIOs, project managers, and business heads.

About the Author

Venkatesh Upadrista currently works for a large services company where he holds responsibility at the business-unit level for managing multiple large client relationships. During his IT career, he has won several large business deals based on his knowledge of consultative selling techniques and IT outsourcing.

Venkatesh began compiling management encyclopedias as a high school student nearly 25 years ago. He has taken a vast collection of experimental facts from various sources and the research he has accumulated over the years and deployed them throughout his professional experience.

He is an advisor to a number of business-development initiatives and has been a partner to the CIOs of several large organizations, helping them define ways to improve their top line and bottom line and to prioritize their IT outsourcing business initiatives.

Venkatesh's experience encompasses project management, sales leadership, and IT outsourcing. He has worked in a blended mixture of the onsite/offshore model and, through his experience, has helped many customers shift their strategies to gain qualitative and quantitative benefits.