Outsourced Resources Productivity Improvement Without Changing Outsourcing Contracts

Outsourcing is a strategic initiative that various organizations use to reduce operational costs and increase market competitiveness. However, these organizations have observed low productivity, underutilized capacity, and low profitability from quality and quantity perspectives while working with outsourced resources. I found that IT clients or customer organizations can use specific strategies for the resource productivity improvements, but these strategies have not been explored yet. This qualitative exploratory research addresses the gap and focused on how, in an outsourcing relationship, information technology (IT) customers can control the productivity improvements of managed services resources without impacting outsourcing contracts. Ten IT managers who have outsourcing experience and have worked with outsourced resources in Denver, Colorado USA were interviewed for this study.