Oareborough Consulting is a management consultancy working in dispute resolution, services sourcing and IT services delivery. We bring clarity of insight, integrity in delivery and value in outcome. The result is your business engaging the best supplier in the optimal way to succeed in its market. Users receive good services, delivered reliably.
IT and Outsourcing Dispute Resolution
We act as Expert Adviser, CPR Part 35 Expert Witness and Expert Determiner. We support you, your legal team and the court in asking the right questions and answering them insightfuly to bring the parties quickly to just resolution.
Sourcing Advisory
We help you select your strategy and run the process of sourcing for you. We bring clear thinking, rigour, method and drive. This delivers a strong agreement and service that takes your business forward and captures savings.
Invigorate Performance
We run transition and transformation for you, getting the best from your suppliers and assuring obligations are fulfilled. We build effective applications, services, governance and relationships. This delivers high service performance and the capability to keep it working.
Dealing with Conflict in IT and Outsourcing
Where parties work together, there is potential for differing interests and expectations to arise. Whilst it is common for small issues to arise in the course of a relationship, most are quickly resolved through normal mechanisms such as Commercial Management, Change Management, Governance bodies or meetings of senior staff.
Sometimes this is not enough.
You may ask your legal department or external lawyers for additional advice. There are well-defined procedures that your lawyers are best placed to advise you on. Small details can make all the difference.
Lawyers understand the law. Some are also well-versed in the practice of IT and Outsourcing. They will seek the advice of those professionally qualified in the relevant discipline to review the case and pleadings. The quality of pleadings can significantly influence the probability of success in a case. A good expert can review a matter from multiple perspectives. The civil procedure rules used in common law place weight on the requirements for balance and consideration of the contrary view.
Those preparing for mediation will wish to assess the strength of their case and that of the other side.
Experts differ in the relevance of their experience to the matter in dispute. Instructing solicitors and counsel will seek the best match of technical experience, credibility as an expert, reliability of performance once engaged and availability. The wise will seek to balance the costs and timing of engagement with the probability of success, knowing that late engagement can harm a case. Rushed investigation is unlikely to be insightful.
What We Do
General Counsel
General Counsel, Solicitors and barristers need the support of current practitioners in forming and settling the case. We can quickly give an assessment of the operational situation, likely opportunities and vulnerability. We express the technical state in terms that your legal team and the Judge understand, drawing out implications for your legal case, for business outcomes and delay that can be valued and contribute influentially. We can act in the role of Expert Determiner to assist you and the other side in the early settlement of appropriate issues.
CIO
CIOs need to ensure the basics of services are right and deliver the outcomes expected. We help you better serve the business by ensuring that your services perform as the business needs them to. Form, invigorate and resolve services to steal a march on your competitors. Deliver new capabilities that drive your business forward. Recover services that are failing and resolve disputes. In this way, we help you make your services and technology work for your business.
You thrive through building justifiable confidence in well-formed relationships founded on trust. We make it easier for businesses to work with their strategic partners throughout the service life-cycle. This results in lower cost, higher performance, improved alignment to your strategy and more effective engagement of your suppliers’ capabilities (whether internal or external).
Delivering Results
Our clients are able to:
- Support intuition with evidence and compelling argument
- Keep stakeholders on side throughout delivery, giving them what they need to maintain justifiable confidence.
- Move faster, capturing benefit sooner
- Achieve more, making better choices
- Concentrate on leading the business, knowing that all the necessary aspects of your programme are being managed coherently
Oareborough moves our clients from understanding, through action, to deliver results.
Dispute Resolution Areas
William Hooper works as an expert witness, neutral advisor and expert determiner in IT and outsourced services. His areas of expertise are:
Fitness for Purpose
Application, code review and forensic analysis, architecture review, project and service management. We have particular experience in large-scale delivery (up to £250m a year). Also multi-vendor services, agile methods, digital transformation, cloud services and professional competence. A good fit delivers the expected business benefits.
We specialise in the specification, procurement, pricing, delivery and improvement of software, IT and outsourced services. We address the investigation and reporting of fitness for purpose, project delay and similarity in software for intellectual property. Unlike some who have lost touch with current practice, we work both in the delivery of services and as an Expert Witness. This has included delivery under Agile methods, DevOps and cloud provisioning. We stay up-to-date through working with emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning.
We have delivered some of the world’s largest applications services and outsourced agreements, up to £250m annual revenues and have delivered in the context of transformation. This experience is associated with rigorous methods and the management of multiple interactions, equipping us well to support you on services of any scale.
Dispute Resolution
We act as an advisor, CPR Part 35 Expert Witness and Expert Determiner. We support you, your legal team and the court in asking the right questions and answering them insightfully to bring the parties quickly to just resolution.
If you call on us before commencing legal proceedings, we will support you to recover fractured relationships to restore failing projects and re-align service performance to meet the needs of central IT, the business and the supplier (where possible).
Form Service Relationships
We help you develop and articulate your strategy and run the process of sourcing for you. We bring clear thinking, rigour, method, market familiarity and drive. This delivers a strong agreement and service that takes your business forward and captures savings.
Invigorate Performance
We run transition and transformation for you, getting the best from your suppliers and assuring obligations are fulfilled. We build effective applications, services, governance and relationships that realise your vision. This delivers high service performance and the capability to keep it working.
Transform Business
We support you in setting direction and defining the capabilities needed. We design, plan and deliver the approach to major change. This supports stakeholders and the organisation they lead, delivering the vision and capturing benefits.
How We Work
IT and Outsourcing have the power to transform performance – for good or ill. They create new possibilities, enabling business models that could not be sustained or would have taken years longer to be realised.
Such power comes with responsibility.
The rate of change that is expected is ever accelerating. Business divisions are impatient and will go elsewhere if dissatisfied. When energy is harnessed, it can mobilise greatness. When elements are miss-aligned or fail to perform, there is commonly more than a single, simple issue at its root. Such complexity requires expertise, skill and diplomacy to resolve. Call us if your team needs help to give of its best.
William Hooper
