Overview:
Quality assurance (QA) and testing services have become a more strategic requirement as businesses seek to speed up development cycles, comply with regulations and standards and reduce costs for new products. For a large global services provider specializing in QA and testing strategies, this new focus increased demand for their services and created many new business opportunities. Using traditional time and materials contract structures, the provider experienced initial growth, landing several large financial services clients.When a large financial services institution asked for a managed service offering to enable more cost and risk control, the provider was unable to create a viable structure to deliver such an offering. Realizing that further growth would stall without the ability to meet this growing customer requirement, the provider asked Emergn to create a managed service offering.
Challenge:
The provider needed to develop a complete managed service offering for the new client.
But simply building a new offering that was only applicable for this single client would not enable the provider to become a more strategic partner for its clients and offer similar service packages to future prospects to continue growing. Emergn had to build an entirely new framework for constructing, managing and delivering more advanced contract models, and instruct the provider’s business development personnel on how to repeat the process on their own. This would give company personnel the tools needed to design custom managed service offerings in the future.
Solution:
Emergn designed all the documents, processes, and materials necessary to support the new managed service. This included guidance for the provider’s business strategists on how to construct templates for fixed-price contract models, gather project requirements and identify necessary stakeholders, and define the service level agreements (SLA) and key performance indicators (KPI) that would frame the engagement’s scope and delivery assessment criteria. Additionally, so the provider could demonstrate a financial case for the longer term engagement, Emergn built a mechanism for conducting proof of concepts (POC) and delivery assessments.
The results
The provider was able to successfully react to the drastic shift in scheduling priorities made to the project and embed themselves with the CSP to begin executing to the new requirements.
The team became an integral part of the Telco company’s delivery arm, and met both the original and new challenges of the contract. Using the new best practices, the provider team began delivering working modifications to the IT estate within the new timeline, and begin producing the cost reductions expected. Subsequently, they were able to see value for the entire overhaul initiative within the first year of the project, keeping overall corporate budgets in line and increasing the quality of experience among their customers.
