Short quiz! What are the advantages of adopting outsourcing model in your corporate strategy? a) cost reduction; b) improve process; c) access to innovation and; d) talent. If you answer all four choices, you got it all correct and you pretty understand how this strategy works.

If outsourcing is not yet part of your organization’s shared services or you are soon considering signing a contract, it will not hurt to consider adding your outsourcing strategy to your next corporate strategy planning.

Don’t discount that you are a startup and you don’t need a corporate strategy! Wrong! Even if you are a small or medium-sized startup, coming up with a corporate strategy should still come on top of your priority list. With a corporate strategy, you can get a full picture of what your company wants to achieve, how you plan to reach your targets and then grow. It can also serve as a blueprint to guide your overall internal and external business directions.

Chances are high that a well-executed outsourcing strategy aligned with your corporate strategy could very much offer leveraged opportunities to your organization. Yet some challenges remain, particularly how you’ll do the alignment of  your outsourcing strategy with your corporate strategy.

Here are some tips for you on getting it right about aligning your corporate strategy with your business process outsourcing goals, and vice versa.

• Don’t focus on the problems. Dwelling too much on problems will hamper and cause strain in your motivation to move forward. Focus on solutions instead. Alignment of your business processes and IT strategies must be a top priority in your organization. Some organizations who tried managing business processes and IT strategies independently experienced lower quality results.

• Plan your Future. If you still feel you only need to deal with what’s presently at hand, you are mistaken. Successful organizations plan. They develop comprehensive, multi-process, and multi-year plan to execute their target operating model. If you are a startup, don’t expect you can manage all the change overnight. Hence, your multi-phase plan will surely help in implementing by phases or stage your new initiatives, learn lessons, and then ramp-up capability.

• Remember discipline. Whatever phase or stage your business is already at in your multi-process, multi-year plan, be prescriptive and disciplined to execute. Whether it is a program management, transition, or performance management, even governance activities that you are implementing, be patient and conscientious. There is no better endings for those who didn’t wait. Your investments may initially seem overly burdensome but it’s all worth the hard work and discipline because like all good endings, you too, will gain a lot from improved operational results, better customer relationships, and reduced operating.

And there are still more lessons to derive out of how most successful companies have achieved significant reduction in operational costs while achieving agile scalability and improved control through strategy alignment. But we’ve only focused on the above three tips only because they are all what makes sense for us now.

Source:

Global Business Services: the secret sauce for successful strategic initiatives in 2013.

The Three Tenets of Global Business Services Execution: Customer Alignment, Accountability, and Economies of Scale.