Outsourcing - Consultants’ Mandates

As promised (threatened) I am going to give my two cents worth on understanding and controlling your process consultant’s mandate. I am sure that if you do engage one of them to help with an outsourcing they will be only too happy to provide their opinion on what your lawyer’s mandate should be!

I think that you are best served if the process consultant you hire – be they an individual with industry experience or a team from a larger specialized firm – has actual experience in delivering outsourced services – i.e. at least one or two members of the team has worked for a period of time at a service provider actually delivering services. Such persons will have insight into what outsourcers can actually deliver, they can better evaluate what parts of a response/proposal are “fluffy” and require clarification, and they will have an industry feel for the situation. I am not saying that people that don’t have this experience cannot add significant value, but I think you get a very practical perspective and advantage if your advisor has actually been there done that.

That being said, it is still your business and your business plans that have to be fulfilled. Consultants work based on models. They analyze your situation and they then give advice based on models that they have studied and or created. Modeling can be good in that it provides framework and comparisons. Modeling and standardization are bad in that their focus is to force square pegs through round holes.

You need to review very carefully what your consultants advise, ask many questions as to how their proposed structure is going to accommodate the “must have” idiosyncrasies of your business that may not be apparent to third parties, and then get the proposed solution updated.

In other short, your consultants are advisors. You have to live with the results, so don’t abdicate decision making to them.