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Business Accent
‘Delivery Assurance’ – Ensuring Business Excellence
Delivery Assurance should be a key component of the delivery
model of a service provider today By Sandhya Bhatia
Sandhya Bhatia |
Economies and business has taken several leaps ahead in the
last two decades. Globalization, outsourcing and rapid changes in the technology
world have made the business environment far more complex than ever. As an increasing
number of enterprises continue to outsource their IT programs, the key to be
the vendor of choice today is to build and deliver on a Delivery Assurance model
that promises predictability of enhanced quality of service to the enterprise
and helps meet the business goals of the enterprise through a robust IT program.
Quality Assurance (QA) has emerged as a key business function in the enterprise.
QA in most IT enterprises ensures the implementation of industry best practices
to predict the performance of SLAs like schedules and defects. However, to achieve
Business Excellence, organizations now need to move a step further. This is
what is referred to as Delivery Assurance (DA). DA deals with foreseeing risks
and taking all necessary steps to manage and mitigate these risks. This allows
the service provider the ability to be able to provide requisite assurance that
projects undertaken will deliver customer satisfaction, improve financial performance
and deliver the desired results to improve return on investment.
DA should be a key component of the delivery model of a service provider today.
This is critical today especially as IT projects are becoming large and complex
as an increasing number of enterprises are willing to outsource larger chunks
of the IT processes and infrastructure. It is therefore a business imperative
to offer the customer an assurance of quality and predictability in the delivery
process that in turn would offer certainty to the customer. Therefore, every
IT services company requires an independent team of experienced assessors who
would play a key role to understand and assess complexities in the customer
business and offer a delivery process that efficiently manages and reduces the
risks in the IT process and the business of the customer and increases stakeholder
(read customer) confidence in the success of big and complex IT programs.
DA is about institutionalizing a value system in the organization that penetrates
every individual and process to assure certainty of delivery to the customer.
A DA program can include a holistic assessment of every project or account based
on key eight areas – Deal Structure, Account Environment, Software Architecture,
Project Planning and Tracking, Financials, Team Organization, Methodological
Approach and Acceptance Criteria. A DA review approach requires an external
management review by objective individuals who look at a broad range of information.
Their charter should be to use a combination of documented information and personal
interviews to provide candid feedback to the management team and the core team
that is responsible for the account or project.
DA is an effective tool to ensure that Project Managers and the sales teams
are not just making promises to customers but are actually partnering with delivery
teams to ensure that the promises made are delivered upon and customers are
assured certainty in the entire delivery mechanism of the IT services company.
DA not only allows an organization to set newer and heightened
levels of delivery benchmarks in the industry, it also offers customers an unmatched
level of confidence in your delivery model which creates a differentiator for
the services organization.
As complexities in IT projects scale newer heights and delivery responsibilities
continue to get decentralized, the increasing role of independent DA function
to the business and clients can no longer be underplayed anymore. Leading IT
services companies that have had the foresight to capture the need to offer
increased predictability to the customers and understand the necessity to build
delivery assurance into their delivery value proposition to customers, have
taken IT services to a whole new level.
It is therefore important for all enterprises to carefully assess the delivery
assurance capabilities and track record of the IT services player in order to
identify the appropriate IT services vendor in the market and ensure that its
road to business excellence is well covered with an assurance of delivery from
the service provider.
The author is Head,Delivery Assurance at CSC India
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