Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

The surrounding stakeholder context

The implications of outsourcing range across all the various environmental factors that press in on the business. This in turn means that the board’s risk assessment – and its communication of what is being done and why – must be holistic, covering all the organization’s stakeholder groups and involving messages specifically tailored to each one. Where there is an immediate and compelling reason to accelerate and or extend externalization – the ‘out’ in outsourcing – then the speed of the preparations for implementing the decision will inevitably suffer.

But whatever the circumstances it is important that the board fully understands the risks that it introduces by speeding up the decision-making process. Specifically, ...