Can this marriage be saved? As in a marriage, all parties start off with the supposition that, other than the occasional spat, most outsourcing relationships will be successful. However, when the bumps on the road appear, the parties are ill equipped emotionally to deal rapidly and effectively to resolve disparate points of view and misunderstandings. As a result, there are often no mechanisms in place to get the relationship back on track.
Current industry wisdom lays the responsibility for effective relationships on the concept of good governance. Yet governance consists of a series of routines, reporting mechanisms and controls, not an approach to managing the very human responses to situations that result in a destructive pattern of misunderstandings and disagreements.
Most outsourcing relationships assume success is an automatic outcome, with failure seen as a remote possibility. Reversing this assumption — that failure of any outsourcing relationship is inevitable, and all mechanisms must be put in place to avoid breakdown — puts the relationship on a very different footing. And when failure is taken as a given, the necessity to put in place avoidance and resolution mechanisms becomes top priority.
Most outsourcing relationships assume success is an automatic outcome, with failure seen as a remote possibility. Reversing this assumption puts the relationship on a very different footing.
Most parties forget that the success of a relationship is based upon a simple rule: if the relationship is not working for one party, it is not working for the other. Taking this statement to heart is key to avoiding failure. Clients and providers intuitively understand this concept, but spend no time during courtship and contract to define failure’s warning signals, responses, and how the parties will effectively change the way they work together.
Early warning signals are generally easy to identify. Many outsourcing arrangements have a fundamental lack of understanding of the cause and effect of relationship breakdown, even though lip service is paid to relationship management during the course of the sourcing event and subsequent contractual phase. Without early attention, seemingly little problems can spiral into a series of perceptions and resultant behaviors that require a major recalibration to get the relationship back on track.
How do the stakeholders identify those signals that indicate that the potential for relationship failure lies ahead? The signs are generally identifiable, ranging from changes in attitude to alterations in routines. When previously amiable provider staff members start to dig in, saying no to any and every request, trouble may loom. When governance routines slip or perpetually change (the governance du jour syndrome), it is symptomatic of the inability to table issues in a constructive way.
If issues or conflicts are automatically escalated upward, it is a signal that the teams may not be able to work effectively together, or that they are fatalistic about their inability to act. And tsunamis of change requests that languish unresolved week after week suggest an inability to tackle problems together.
Diagnosing the points of dispute — whether real or perceived — is the first step. Simply put, the first step is to tally a comprehensive, bilateral list of gripes, defining where all expectations and measurements — whether formal or informal — are not being met. Each gripe should have a describable and quantifiable cause that can be linked to an identifiable effect. These gripes may be contractually documentable such as missing SLAs ‘x’ percent of the time on call resolution, or describe ways of working that are not effective, such as the inability to provide a timely response to requests for information. Every gripe must be treated as real and actionable.
Understanding and aligning approaches to failure is imperative. The biggest challenge in avoiding failure in outsourcing relationships is responding in the same way or aligning each side’s response to failure. Failure unfortunately results from the inability to perform and the perception that performance has not been attained.
