Businesss Performance Management in Outsourcing

Business Performance Management in Outsourcing

As outsourcing becomes more mature as an industry, structures and best practices are being developed. Organisations like the ITSqc are defining best practice models around sourcing, and management tools are being developed. Business Performance Management is one of those tools. It is a systematic approach to performance improvement, and is increasingly being used in outsourcing.

BPM provides a ongoing picture of how the outsourcing deal is performing – and importantly gives the same view to both the service provider and client. To do this we need to establish a meaningful SLA. The key step are:-

• Establish strategic performance objectives
• Break down the engagement into vital processes that advance those objectives
• Identify important variables in those processes
• Define acceptable performance levels at each variable
• Craft a service level agreement (SLA) that details processes, key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets
• Monitor those key performance indicators
• Address any areas where quality is falling short

The process of including business objectives is covered in another article. The process of measuring the performance of the SLA, is one that ServiceFrame specialises in. Serviceframe is a web based service which allows an organisation to track its SLAs, and more importantly, the supplier performance against the SLAs. Serviceframe can be set up and running for an SLA within 30 minutes and is very easy to use.

You can see a demo of Serviceframe here or start a free trial here.