Allocate Two Full Days a Week of Your Own Time for the Foreseeable Future

If this statement makes you gasp, you’re not ready for transformational outsourcing. Many executives have been misled about the importance of their own personal involvement by one of the promised benefits of conventional outsourcing: the ability to focus management attention on more strategic matters. This promise is wrong twice over. First, even in conventional outsourcing deals, senior executives must stay intimately involved in the process to make sure that contracts and relationships reflect the real objectives of the organization and to ensure that workforce transitions are smooth. In transformational outsourcing, the outsourcing relationship is the strategic activity that matters most. It could not have a higher call on senior executives’ time and attention.

The sourcing director at National Savings and Investments in the initial stages of the transformation was highly experienced in outsourcing when Peter Bareau recruited her. She had orchestrated 13 separate relationships for British Airways. On the question of conserving management time and attention, she snorted, ‘‘Some people think that if you have a problem, you can just outsource it, and it will go away. It never does. The leadership team at NS&I were clear from the beginning that we were just swapping one management challenge for another. We didn’t underestimate the challenge. There was no guarantee of success. We were out to do something radical.’’ Even with this preamble, some of the executives at NS&I would argue that they failed to understand how much of their time and attention the transformation would require.