Tag: innovation

Building a Robust Global Services Management Organization | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Today’s large, global companies face an ever-growing need for talented resources to manage their increasingly complex global services delivery organizations. The requirements extend far beyond traditional models that often found firms simply assigning the “folks who have performed the service for the past 20 years” into various leadership roles. While that was never a best practice, in today’s world, it can be catastrophic.

Global services delivery leaders of today must navigate a complicated mix of internal and external delivery engines while forecasting supply versus demand and keeping clients happy across diverse regions and cultures. To meet these demands, leading global services organizations are increasingly adopting highly integrated cross-business leadership teams sponsored at the most senior levels of the corporation.

The graphic below illustrates this concept in a hypothetical global organization.

Global services management organization

Organizations seeking to build a robust team to deliver their services globally into the next generation should consider the following best practices as observed by Everest Group in working with many of the world’s leading organizations:

  • Global governance structures should be aligned with corporate strategy and chaired by a senior leader at the appropriate level in the organization
  • The governance structure should include an Executive Steering Committee and have formal dedicated roles for key global functions
  • The structure should have responsibility for global strategy, planning, design authority, reporting, delivery, talent development, and innovation
  • The structure should have global process leaders who are responsible for the design, implementation, and compliance of standardized processes across the enterprise, with appropriate representation and input from all lines of business
  • Increasingly, business services are maturing from a legacy functional approach (Finance, Procurement, Tax, Human Resources, etc.) to an end-to-end approach (e.g., Purchase-to-Pay, Record-to-Report-to-File, Order-to-Cash, Hire-to-Retire, etc.).  Appropriate transition and transformation teams must be deployed to manage this migration
  • The structure should also ensure the effective management and integration of all delivery centers

Above all, Everest Group’s experience suggests that companies must treat global services management as a vital business unit with appropriate priority given to recruiting and retaining the talent necessary to execute with excellence and deliver the next generation of value from global services.

Independent Software Testing Services: What’s the Real Deal? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Hardly a day has passed in the past couple of quarters without a service provider boasting of its testing services during the spurts of organizational restructuring, analyst meetings, and earning calls. Industry news portals carry articles on software testing almost every other day, and the revenue from this service line is growing fast, very fast. At the same time, industry sources tell us of amazingly low rates quoted by providers for testing services, even those delivered onsite.

With this – coupled with multiple queries from a variety of providers, buyers, and investors in the past six months, and our own questions on the seeming price play versus potential, leverageable innovations – it was clear the time had come for us to gain deeper insights into the current and future state of the independent testing services industry.

Thus, we recently launched a research initiative to determine the real deal in testing services.

Key areas covered in the report include:

  • Innovations in the horizon (such as cloud, crowd, IP, and engagement models)
  • Drivers and inhibitors of outsourcing the testing process (from both buyer and provider perspectives)
  • Adoption trends across the buyer community (by size, geography, and industry)
  • Contribution of various industries, geographies, resourcing structure etc. for providers
  • Prevalent pricing and engagement models, typical deal size, duration, etc.
  • Growth drivers, challenges in IP monetization, and what lies ahead for testing services

It was interesting to learn some major outsourcing industries are lagging when it comes to outsourcing testing services, how manual functional testing continues to dominate testing offerings, how T&M and fixed pricing are faring, and what’s happening on testing engagement models. Further, while on the surface testing continues to be a “hire manual functional testers in India” strategy for most providers, dig deep and you can see the flux in automation, IP creation, cloud, crowd, and various other innovations.

While discussing testing with large and small service providers, we could not help but see the value of innovation –yes innovation, the great lip service that has been done to death in IT services, but in testing there is more to it. We expected the providers to discuss the new and cool things they are doing in testing services, but such a strong focus on innovation took us a little by surprise. Therefore, the fundamental premise of our report was based on innovation and the path ahead for testing services.

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