The choice of partner can have profound effects, in love and in commerce. Few get married with the intent of immediate divorce. What considerations should sway your selection of IT managed service partner? A good selection results in your finding the party that delivers you the best value solution to your need. The Office of…
Juliet’s farewell to Romeo was full of remorseful kisses. For some approaching the end of a sourcing agreement, the move cannot come too soon. How can you minimise the pain of partition? Most attention is paid to transition in. Here we look from the perspective of the terminating operation. Why Exit? Most agreements run their…
The contract has been signed. Champagne has been consumed. The hangover is over – or is it just beginning? It takes many organisations two years or more to get a new service up and running effectively. In these times of short contract duration, expectations of flick-a-switch cloud services and agile delivery, what can you do…
What are the practical measures that need to be taken to establish belief in change and to manage it successfully? William Hooper reports from inside a service transformation. This article was originally published in Business Strategy Review Issue 4 2013 and is reproduced with permission. Inside Change_Business Strategy Review {Click on the link for free…
Many a governance body and service manager sees themselves as drowning in report data, but intelligence to inform decision-making and drive the business forward is elusive. How to get to brief, succinct relevance that informs and drives performance? Why is Reporting Such a Problem? I have seen, and indeed found myself in the middle of,…
Business users and IT (and other services) departments love to be rude about each other. Mutual incomprehension and worse frequently reign. What can you do to establish and maintain a healthy relationship and the high quality of service alignment? The gap between Business and IT has long been deep. IT people too often have little…
CEOs have long seen the potential for technical innovation to steal a march on their competition. Some like Google and Amazon have consummately reinvented their industries this way. Achieving the goal is however desperately difficult. What could you do to define the vision, business model and deliver appropriate technology to support them? The Prize Strategists…
The reason for making any change is that there is an expectation that the new state will be sufficiently better than the current to justify the effort of undergoing the change. How can a business case be supported by the reliable management of benefits to capture more of the expected return? Art enlivens the soul.…
There are few matters raising as much heat and as little light in service provision as innovation. Customers are often aggrieved that they do not gain the competitive advantage they think they have paid for. How can you gain competitive advantage from innovation by sourcing services effectively? At the start of an assignment some time…
Ways to make decisions well. Guarding against bias. Governance. Major incident response and making decisions under pressure.