- Our services
- IT contract assessment
- IT Transformation monitoring
- Project success criteria – evidence artefact assessment
To whom are my services tailored for? Any organization which is undergoing IT transition involving vendors. Normally I interact directly with organization CTOs, IT Managers or their designated substitutes. I work lean but not alone: large scale, complex transformations with long timeline involve close and regular management and this is where I involve teams of professionals from partner organizations with years of experience in industry.
Introduction
We have witnessed many IT transformations and based on common patterns we have tailored our services to help organizations get most out of IT outsourcing. By engaging with us at the early phase of contract negotiations you will be able to avoid the mistakes a lot of organizations have been going through. IT vendors tend to cut corners on the cost of customers.
We dive into details of each business case and make sure your business interests are securely positioned in the contract. In these busy days it is very easy for important contractual details to slip by unaligned, unsecured leaving space for expectation misalignment and interpretation that comes at a cost. Sometimes this cost can result in long unplanned transformation delays and doubled, tripled budget that is so hard to just justify. This is why deliverables, that are critical for your business need to be clearly articulated and secured in the contract. Having gone through various IT transitions I see the problems as well as mistakes in decision-making that lead to these problems are common. I am here to provide early warnings to avoid mistakes others have made.
Is the legacy (incumbent) tools and routines secured during the transition to ensure your business continuity?
Are all dependencies adequately understood and managed to avoid domino effect during cutover that could lead to delays and loss of control, painful decisions with long term negative impact?
Knowledge – Are KTs properly planned and documented to ensure the new IT organization has sufficient knowledge about your IT infra and applications.
Is knowledge spread across several resources or concentrated within few critical resources who might consider leaving as a result of transitioning. Are critical resources secured to avoid impact on operational stability.
Is the escalation procedure agreed, tested and updated regularly to include sufficient info e.g. in what scenarios which resources to be approached?
Is the criteria for calculating, applying penalties agreed properly to avoid endless disputes and misalignment in future.
Is there is exit procedure agreed in the contract and supporting lower level procedures – for example the ownership of documentation created by vendor that is part of your organization support. For example, are you aware of the impediments around shipping back HW sent out to India, e.g. workstations? Have you thought about the data disposal procedure in case you wont be able to ship back your servers, workstations from 3rd party countries like India. How will data be disposed of. Who will control that?
Are the reports reflecting the actual situation in reality? Who is challenging the reports provided by vendor?
What is the framework of communication model between your organization and the vendor. What communication tools, platforms are going to be used (yours, vendors, other)?
Resourcing – do you as a customer have a say in what vendor resources are going to be involved? What is their allocation to your contract, what is their location, expertise level, communication skills? Is there a potential for building a gap between your expectations and the future service model that will be delivered for example the cultural gap, time difference etc. For example – if resourcing and communication details are not agreed upon in the contract you might end up having 10 resources acting on 0.1 FTE load on your account, and these 10 persons could be located in India and constantly change. While you and your customers are located in Europe you might end up in the situation when the vendor is delivering its services on paper while the result is far from desired.
When processes dont work there is an increasing layer of red tape to fix things. But this is eating up a lot of time leaving no time for real improvements.
How to prepare for the blamegame (collecting evidence)
Vendor and customer interest clash
| Vendor interests | Customer interests |
| Close the project as soon as possible with as little effort and investment as possible | Receive stable, user friendly service |
| Outsource contracts to 3rd party partner organizations based in low cost zones and keep the margin while maintaining the contractual obligations and receiving considerable pay | |
Outsourcing your IT is not necessarily doomed to fail. Whether it will be a success or not depends on how well the homework has been understood and performed. This is where I can help you.
Identification of Quick wins
OLD text from Onenote
We provide IT quality assurance services for infrastructure projects. Based on years of our experience we are able to identify top risk areas of failure and work to prevent business disruptions as early as possible. We believe failures occur at culture clash areas and we tailor our services to ensure transitions run as seamless as possible. Your end users are behind each IT change and they are the ones to drive your company with the tools you give them. No doubt the decisions are smart but what about the work done behind the scenes thousands of miles away in India? To what extent do you control this? How tailored are the IT solutions for the needs of your company? How well tested are they? How trustworthy are the reports provided by your vendors? What`s the real reason for delayed milestone dates?
Get us involved to drill to the bottom and get things right from the start.
First things first – we need to get clear on What is the scope of the contract?
What are the milestones? We need to see the project plan and supporting documentation. Depending on the
Latest trends show more and more work is being contrcted to countries like India providing unprecendeted financial savings but also creating cultural gaps that jeoperdize project outcomes. We are here to act as bridge to ensure quality is there and solutions reach production at the expected standards.
Over years of experience in IT we have identified areas where IT projects fail most repeatedly and from day 1 we keep those areas in focus and drive vendors to contrctually set targets.
We normally start with tailoring Quality Assurance plan to specific needs of the project, we make sure the QA plan has built in metrics to make all deviations transparent. We make sure the QA plan is agreed by all parties to avoid misinterpretations at a later stage. We then work with vendor and customer to ensure Acceptance Criteria is locked and not ammedned along the way. By proper planning and focus on Dependency management, Risk and issue management we help vendors drive the project.
We act as virtual project management layer whose task is to add quality to service.
So what are the areas of repeated failure
Lack of tailored solution – IT companies tend to use out of the box approach as much as possible as it allows them to save time and costs and stay in the comfort zone. IT solutions are configurable but it requires script customizations, additional testing and problem solving. With tight deadlines and limited team resourcing there is great deal of temptation to stick to out of the box solutions and get them accepted by the customer (officially) to formally tick off deliverables. Once done it is almost impossible to get the tailored solution implemented.
Improper testing –