Service Provider – Select Well

The service provider landscape is huge and extremely diverse. Service provider size (ten to ten thousands of employees), geographic location (local to global), compliance (none to strict) or service portfolio (specialist to generalist) are just part of the total from which to choose. Price, company background, preferred business model, mode of client interaction, infrastructure, equipment or project management add further to service provider diversity. With so many choices – how to select the best?

Contrary to expectations, the structured approach does not start in the wide world of service providers but internally, in the world of the client because the only way to select the best is to be clear what exactly is the best. In other words, some wish list or list of requirements is necessary. Just as with Xmas wish lists, especially those asking elderly relatives to buy fancy electronics for digitally native kids, it really pays off to be clear and precise on the details.

A common management argument against a structured service provider selection aims at the perceived disproportion between resource investment and result since “any decent company will do for us”. While this is true, at least sometimes, the structured approach comes with a bonus – it creates good matches between client and service provider.

This is a preview of the next PERMANENTs Newsletter. Full downloadable PDF will soon be available here: https://www.dr-henrich.com/publications/permanents/