Preface

Who Is This Book for?
This book is written foremost for the people who are either tasked with or are carrying out the “heavy lifting” of their companies’ ambitious global outsourcing efforts: the project managers, team leaders, and team members assigned to improve, redesign, and create low-cost, high-quality business processes.

In addition, we hope that the business leaders who are guiding global outsourcing projects (often called champions or sponsors) can use the book to gain insights into the tasks, actions, and challenges faced by their teams in the trenches.

Finally, anyone seeking to better understand the details of global outsourcing can learn from the material contained in the ensuing pages.

What Does This Book Cover?
When building something innovative, one needs a clear blueprint. Unfortunately, while there is much general discussion about global outsourcing, almost all of it is either anecdotal or simplistic. In order to help you unlock the value of global outsourcing, we decode some of the core concepts behind this trend.

• Best practices. Global outsourcing encompasses a broad array of business skills that are essential ingredients for success. Throughout this book, we use best-practice case studies to show you how to apply the concepts to many different processes and tasks and maximize the impact of your efforts.
• Business models. Many different outsourcing business models exist. This book gives you customizable guidelines that take into account your business needs and readiness for change.
• Creating your roadmap. Global outsourcing is as much about people, vendor selection, country selection, and project management as it is about cost reduction. Our goal is to show you how to achieve a balance between managing people and improving performance.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the companies that successfully implement global outsourcing are going to put a lot of pressure on their competitors to follow suit. Obtaining even a small cost advantage in today’s brutally competitive marketplace can mean the difference between market leadership and failure.

The Organization of This Book
When we wrote this book we tried to structure it so that a variety of readers, from novices to managers in the midst of outsourcing projects, would find it easy to navigate. While you may prefer to read it cover to cover, the content is organized in four parts to help you learn about global outsourcing at the level of depth you choose. Following is a quick guide to the content.

• Part One of the book provides a thorough overview of the global outsourcing landscape. We begin by defining key concepts and trends (Chapter 1), the business process landscape (Chapter 2), and a step-by-step methodology for executing global outsourcing (Chapter 3).
• Part Two of the book provides a detailed overview of the strategy planning process — what, why, and when you should outsource (Chapter 4) and the different business models for making it happen (Chapter 5).
• Part Three of the book focuses on the how-to of sourcing. We present the steps that companies need to create clear, focused global outsourcing strategies: gathering the intelligence via the RFI and RFP process (Chapter 6), deciding on vendors (Chapter 7), selecting locations (Chapter 8), and negotiating the contract (Chapter 9).
• Part Four of the book focuses on post-contract execution. Formulating the strategy and signing the contracts are only the beginnings of the sourcing effort: Processes have to be transitioned, management structures established, and SLAs monitored. We present the steps that companies need to concentrate on to get results: transition management (Chapter 10), governance (Chapter 11), performance monitoring and management (Chapter 12), and exit strategies if necessary (Final Thoughts).

At the book’s end, we hope that readers will return to their organizations with new ideas and an understanding that global outsourcing is a journey, not a one-time event with a quick payoff.

Acknowledgements
We were very fortunate to have the participation of many people who took the time to discuss global outsourcing with us. To each of these people, we would like to express thanks for the ideas, insights, and experiences they shared with us.

In particular, we would like to thank Joe McGrath, Tom Elliott, Shirsh Netke, BVR Mohan Reddy, Deena Harapanahalli, Eric Rongley, V. Bharathwaj, Sudipto Chakravarty, David Burke, Gregg Scoresby, Van Hansen, Janette Everette, Stanley Singh, Srinivas Koneru, Akash Arora, Ismail Al Naqi, Johanna Chapman, Daniel Wittner, Keith Rhodes, Anthony Maeillo, Jim Suciu, Burton Toole, Karl Meyer, Laurent Rotival, Lata Sharma, and Pam Bellamy.

We also would like to thank E-Business Strategies: Jennifer Doty, Tim Geary, and especially Allison Loudermilk for her copy editing expertise and Brandon Doty for his layout and design talent.

Special thanks to Lynn Lorenc, for her encouragement and advice. Finally, thank you to our family and friends who have supported us over the years.

Marcia Robinson
Ravi Kalakota
Suresh Sharma