In business, technology and most other fields, standards have come to play an increasingly important role. Standards provide a framework for coordinating the work of a field’s practitioners, which is particularly important when that work involves activities taking place across multiple projects in multiple organizations. Standards also provide a field a benchmark for comparison and evaluating performance. Most importantly, standards free a field’s seasoned practitioners to spend more time on improvements and innovation, and less time ensuring that everybody’s covering the basics.
To date, however, few standards have taken hold within the field of outsourcing. While some standards have become generally recognized for how certain types of outsourced work should be performed — such as CMM for software development, ITIL for technology services, ISO for overall business processes — few have been advanced for the process of outsourcing itself.
One standard that has been around for a while, and is beginning to gain some traction, is eSCM from Carnegie Mellon University’s IT Services Qualification Center. eSCM establishes standards for the business processes of companies that provide IT and IT-enabled outsourcing services. More recently a complementary customer-side set of standards has been developed and released. This effort, along with others like it, such as the one being discussed by GM in support of its recent multisourcing contract, represents an important first step with others being underway.
Over the past year the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) has released two sets of standards for outsourcing professionals — one for ethics and business practices and the other for professional capabilities in support of the outsourcing process.
The ethical and business practice standards are a guide for ensuring that outsourcing professionals adhere to generally accepted business standards for ethics and conduct in doing their work. This includes understanding and adhering to the business practices, laws and regulations that apply to the organizations with which they work; accurately communicating their and their organization’s capabilities to others; accountability for the outcomes of their work; working to enhance the outsourcing profession itself, as well as their own professional skills; being effective advocates for outsourcing; and encouraging identification and resolution of ethical and business-practice issues if and when they occur.
The second set of standards is geared toward ensuring high-quality outsourcing outcomes by constantly improving the capabilities of the business and project leaders responsible for defining, implementing and managing these complex multicompany business relationships. They address the non-domain specific responsibilities common to most outsourcing initiatives and are, therefore, applicable, irrespective of the functions being outsourced, the industries of the companies involved and the individual’s specific role — be it customer, provider or advisor.
Together, these two sets of standards form the base for moving from publishing standards to certifying professionals. The Certified Outsourcing Professional (COP) designation is intended to ensure that an ever increasing number of individuals working on outsourcing projects possess the capabilities required to design, implement and manage initiatives with a high probability of achieving the organization’s intended outcomes.
The development, promotion and adoption of standards — at both the organizational and the individual professional level — will go a long way toward the continued growth and success of outsourcing as a management practice, a profession and as an industry.
