Outsourcing Contract Management

In a typical outsourcing engagement, a customer will spend months of effort and substantial expense putting together and negotiating a comprehensive service agreement, often including hundreds or even thousands of pages of detailed schedules and exhibits. By the time the deal closes, it may be tempting to return to business as usual while the service provider proceeds with its transition and commences work. But managing a service provider is fundamentally different from managing the employees that the service provider replaced, and filing that service agreement away in a drawer can be an expensive mistake. Successful outsourcing relationships take real work to achieve, and knowing how to implement the terms of the service agreement can provide some valuable tools to help make that relationship work.