Jennifer led the RFP to outsource most of the functions she had managed for years. She was highly experienced and well regarded. The contract structure was largely dictated by her company’s legal department and the framework provided by a consultant. But it was her job to write the Scope of Work and define the Service Level Agreements.
It was that last part – writing the SOW and defining the SLAs – that wound up hurting her company more than anything. As the in-house expert, she knew what needed to be done, how it needed to be done, and how to assess performance. In her eagerness to get it right, she wound up with an 800-page contract with 82 sets of SLAs covering every last detail down to how often to cut the grass. Many of the SLAs were ambiguous and subjective, but she knew what to look for.
In fairness to Jennifer, the company that won the RFP accepted that monster SOW and its 82 sets of SLAs. It’s hard to judge that decision. In any negotiation there are too many factors for an outside observer to assess. But the approved contract launched Jennifer and the service provider team assigned to support her into a downward spiral.
No matter what the service provider did, it was never good enough for Jennifer. I don’t think Jennifer deliberately took the position that the service provider could NEVER do it right. In fact, she told me she would love to see the service provider perform well. But let’s examine the pressures she was under and the incentives she might feel, even if not consciously.
Bottom line, if the service provider performed well, it would make her look bad. She was the expert. She’d managed those functions internally. If the service provider wound up doing BETTER than she had, what would her bosses think? And the combination of excessively detailed SOW and somewhat ambiguous SLAs left her room to always find fault.
Unable to ever get it “right,” the service provider team’s morale steadily deteriorated. By the time I met them, nearly two years into the contract, their leaders were frustrated and miserable, performance was less than they would have liked, they were experiencing high turnover, and there seemed to be no way out.
What they needed to do was rewrite the SOW and apply Vested Outsourcing's Rule 2: focus on WHAT should be done, at the highest level possible, and not HOW; make sure SLAs were few, clearly defined, objective and measurable; and establish a jointly managed governance structure that could address any needed changes and drive process improvements.
And if we could rewind, I would have suggested transferring Jennifer to the service provider. Then she would have had every incentive to lead her team to beat her own historical performance.
Do you have a Junkyard Dog in your world? Please share your story.
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