7 Lessons Learned to Articulate ‘What Good Looks Like’ for External Service Delivery

The key critical element of successful delivery of externally commissioned services is being clear on ‘what good looks like’ to both you and your external service provider.?However, in the many hundreds of external service delivery partnerships we have reviewed over the years, this is the single, most persistent challenge that both organisations and their external suppliers seem unable to articulate. This usually leads to misunderstandings, scope creep, unexpected costs and severe time delays. Worst of all, the business benefits that were so appealing at the outset, often fail to be realised.

How successful organisations articulate what good external service delivery looks like

There are a number of steps that organisations who have been successful in achieving strong service delivery have undertaken. It’s no coincidence why they have been successful time and time again in ensuring their external service delivery partners achieve their business outcomes, innovate well and reduce service delivery costs in the process.

Explain the ‘Why’

When articulating the service outcomes you want to achieve from an external provider/supplier, it’s critical to not only specify what you need but also to explain why these needs are important in the broader business or organisational context. By sharing the strategic objectives behind your requirements, such as long-term growth plans, market positioning, customer satisfaction or cost-saving goals, you provide your suppliers with a deeper understanding of the value you’re seeking.

This enables them to critical friend challenge your assumptions, often leading to their proposing innovative solutions you may not have previously considered. It also helps to reduce misunderstandings over your expectations and ensures that their service delivery aligns with both your current operations and future aspirations.

Reduce Disputes

When you articulate ‘what good looks like’ for your organisation remember: suppliers of complex outsourced services often possess deep industry expertise, gained through delivering similar projects across sectors. This includes technical knowledge, insights into market trends, regulatory shifts and risk management.

However, most legal contracts focus only on the outsourced service and neglect contracting explicitly for the supplier’s advisory role. This occurs because legal frameworks typically centre on deliverables rather than the broader value suppliers can provide. By contracting separately for the supplier’s expertise, clients benefit from strategic advice that ensures better alignment with business outcomes, mitigates risk and fosters innovative solutions. This approach transforms the supplier into a strategic partner, helping to avoid inefficiencies and missed opportunities and ensuring a more tailored service delivery.

How you articulate ‘what good looks like’ and what you document to your external service provider:

1. What business challenges are you facing? If one of your business challenges is that you need to cut ￡20m per annum from your service delivery overhead, but still maintain service levels, then tell this to your potential supplier. Don’t side line the issue. Be upfront about it.
2. Explain the operational challenges you believe you are facing in achieving these outcomes. Detail what you have already tried to cut your costs but maintain service delivery levels; the aspects that have worked, the aspects that have not. Explain why you think the activities that were successful worked, but also explain why you think the activities that didn’t achieve your outcomes, didn’t work. Be honest about what didn’t work and why. If you aren’t sure why certain initiatives didn’t work – say so.
3. Set out the structure of your organisation and what part your service delivery plays within it. Identify those departments which are impacted by the service delivery levels of your department. If your department’s service delivery is poor, which other departments would be impacted by this? For example, your customer contact centre may well see calls escalate with complaints. Your website may well see increased complaint activities too. The complaint handlers will have a much greater workload. What do you do about the backlog of service requests and getting back on top of them? Do you just delay the service delivery or would you engage in interim/temporary resource to help clear the backlog? Explain the process with use cases so your delivery partner understands properly how you deal with these issues.
4. Explain, document and flow-chart (in process terms) how you operate now. It’s not uncommon for departments to assume that when a supplier deploys its external service delivery skills, that the department will operate as it does now, but with some bells and whistle enhancements. Often what happens is that a new operational process is implemented by an external supplier that promises much better effectiveness and delivery levels. However, aspects of the existing service are sometimes missed – simply because the requirements specification only details the ‘what’, not the ‘how’ (existing operational process and use cases).
5. Explain the challenges you are experiencing within your current operational processes. Include resource, efficiency and cost challenges. Identify where you think specific problems exist and what thoughts you have had in trying to address those specific challenges. Again, provide use cases of the challenges and where they often appear in your operating process).
6. Ensure your existing service costs and service levels are independently benchmarked. In addition, verify that they are compared on a like-for-like basis against similar services in other similar organisations. In fairness, no two organisations are identical, but you can apply ‘weighting factors’ and adjustments so that you achieve a sensible comparison. When your potential suppliers then come back with their proposed costings, you will be able to see and compare quite quickly whether they are in the right ball-park on an apples-to-apples basis.
7. Ensure that you have a clear template response mechanism. Attach this to your documented ‘what good looks like’ information, ideally in a matrix that suppliers can respond to in terms of whether they can meet your business outcomes. You’ll also need to get the potential supplier to quantify what assumptions they have made in putting together any proposed service delivery options. In this way, any misunderstandings over your requirements will be quickly identified. Ideally, the response matrix should have clearly quantified:

• What outcomes the potential supplier can/cannot meet.?
• What compromises you’ll have to live with.
• What the consequence will be of the outcomes they cannot meet.
• How the outcomes will be delivered.

The above only deals with being clear between yourselves on ‘what good looks like’. There are many other considerations when commissioning external service delivery partners, but getting this aspect right is by far the single biggest challenge we see client organisations and their suppliers struggle with.

As a more general point, we would always advise you test these earlier outcomes and assumptions in an Early Market Engagement process so you receive valid feedback about the degree to which your outcomes/requirements, time scales and budgetary constraints are likely to be achieved, prior to going out for any formal procurement exercise.

Get a weekly dose of best practice advice on successfully managing complex supplier relationship, from our weekly blog.