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Benchmarking / Metrics
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A Practical Approach to Outsourcing Pricing
Pricing of outsourcing services must be a tricky formula. Most clients don’t really know what they’re paying end-to-end for the IT or business process function internally. How does a service provider set a realistic price for its services?
Agile Outsourcing: End User Metrics in Software Development
What happens when users are dissatisfied with the results of outsourcing efforts? They implement shadow efforts to recreate the functionality they need out of the outsourced software development projects. This article elaborates upon the different criteria that can be applied in designing meaningful user satisfaction surveys.
Agile Outsourcing: Managing People Metrics in Outsourced Software Development
This month, we elaborate on the different people metrics that may be relevant to managing personnel turnover, whether in domestic or offshore software development situations.
Agile Outsourcing: Managing Technology Metrics in Software Development
In outsourcing software development three groups of technology metrics demand attention: systems, networks and support application metrics. This article explains why they're important and what they are.
Agile Outsourcing: Metrics for Outsourced Software Development
Defining a proper set of metrics is often a good place to start to make your outsourced software development succeed.
Benchmarking IT Services
This is the only free report we’re aware of that actually provides some pricing information (with many caveats regarding variations) for common IT activities provided by service providers.
China - IT Outsourcing Panel: Managing Perception and Improving Reality to Capture the IT Opportunity
This PowerPoint presentation provides research and data on IT outsourcing to Chinese firms. It’s a useful rundown on market size and what the pros and cons are (though you'll see more pros than cons...) . If you're looking for stats to supplement a business case on working with a Chinese firm, this could be a useful resource.
Costing IT Services -- An Introduction to Services Based Costing
If you find yourself in the position of justifying the services you provide -- either internally or externally -- you may turn to some form of service-based accounting to quantify the components -- people, equipment and services -- that make up your offerings.
Dealing with SLAs and Visitors from 'Outlier' Space
There is an approach for setting SLAs that can help avoid most common mistakes and that can be applied in many situations without committing to full-blown Six Sigma training and deployment.
Does your outsourcing agreement measure up?
How to get the best out of your service provider through methodical benchmarking.
Fundamentals of Service Management
This 45-page “e-book," written by SLM maven Andrew Hiles and consultant Floyd Piedad, is an interesting assortment of content. It includes data culled from Mr. Hiles’ books about the value of good service level management, a discussion of proper help desk operations, and an essay by Mr. Piedad on best practices for monitoring servers. If you don’t understand how SLM ties into meshing business value with IT services, this report is worth reading for some basics.
InformationWeek Outsourcing Tech Center
The latest coverage of outsourcing, including a link to Outsourcing Pipeline, a weekly e-newsletter on the topic, which occasionally shares useful, practical tidbits.
IT Service Management: Service Outsourcing Questionnaire
This 14-page whitepaper provides a set of questions that can help you gather high-level and low-level information about your IT services. This stuff comes in handy if you’re formulating a statement of work, an RFI or a contract to hand off to service providers. It’s also a great place to start an IT inventory if you’re looking to transform your internal service operations.
Metrics for IT Outsourcing Service Level Agreements
This whitepaper is a basic introduction to the topic that you may find useful. The author shares five principles in selecting SLA metrics, then explains four major categories of metrics -- and the advantages and disadvantages as well as application for each.
Reducing Operational Risk in Business Process Outsourcing
BPO is filled with risks, whether done onshore or offshore. This article provides a method for monitoring and measuring operational parameters in business process outsourcing in order to mitigate operational risk substantially.
SLM Solutions: A Buyer’s Guide
This 40-page excerpt of a book provides a fairly readable explanation about service level management, as well as data and trends. But its biggest value is in the briefs it provides on SLM “solutions,” products that purport to help you automate some or all of the work of service management.
Software without Borders: Measure the Success of Your Outsourcing with Metrics
Outsourcing promises huge cost savings, but it's important to know the money you spend is fueling real progress in the development of your software. How can this be done? It's called metrics.
Sourcing Inside Out: Benchmarking Clauses that Work
Benchmarking clauses have been getting a lot of attention recently. Are they necessary? Do they work? Do alternatives exist? Compass believes benchmarking clauses remain the best mechanism clients can use to gauge the value being delivered by their service provider and to adjust contract terms to reflect market changes.
Sourcing Inside Out: Why Vendors Don't Like Benchmarking Clauses
Benchmarking clauses are written into most outsourcing contracts to mandate a periodic review of rates and quality against industry standards. So why do service providers do their best to avoid benchmarking clauses?
Successful Outsourcing: Benchmarking or Relationship Building
Useful insights about the use of benchmarking. What’s especially practical is the page four section: “Best Practices Available for Outsourcing Contracts.”
Supplier metrics that matter
To obtain more from suppliers, you need to examine the way you measure performance, according to this article by Vantage Partners director Jonathan Hughes.
The Art of Management in Outsourcing
We spoke with Blue Canopy about the realities of outsourcing management. An expert explains how to gain visibility into the performance of your project, what form a performance dashboard should take and why SLAs can deceive you into complacency.
The Critical Role of Service Level Metrics in an Outsourcing Transaction
A rudimentary explanation of service levels. You’ll learn why they’re necessary, how the service provider likes to set them, why financial penalties aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and what you as the client should avoid doing when you’re sorting out your service levels.
The Economics of Outsourcing
If you’re evaluating the option of keeping IT staff and operations in-house; outsourcing IT; outsourcing just programming and operations but keeping planning and management internally; or outsourcing operations domestically and programming offshore, you’ll want to read this 13-page report. Max Rosenblatt has performed the admirable service of developing a spreadsheet that compares personnel and related costs across those four variations. This study doesn’t take into consideration equipment -- simply salary, employment expenses and space.
The Real Costs of Outsourcing, Part 1
You can't believe service provider promises about how much you'll save with offshoring. Here's how to develop a realistic assessment of cost savings.
The Real Costs of Outsourcing, Part 2
This whitepaper can help you identify the "hard dollar costs" attributable to outsourcing and give you a more realistic assessment of what it will cost your organization.
The Role of Metrics in managing service relationships
Author Surendra Saxena lists a slew of metrics you might consider invaluable to your sourcing strategy. No, the idea isn’t to monitor all of them. Look through the list included here to make sure you haven’t overlooked something that might prove useful.
TPI Gives Some Free Outsourcing Advice
TPI advisors share insights on what a financial services firm looking to do BPO will experience during its assessment; what’s driving financial services firms to outsource; and what kinds of carrots to put in your outsourcing agreements.
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