Tips for Business: How to choose the right company for IT-outsourcing

Today the interest for the companies who have decided to go to IT outsourcing, are contractors with good projects, “pure” history and focus on the real market situation. However, even with these characteristics, customer needs guarantees of quality and timely fulfillment of obligations by the service provider. And if the regulator before relations between the two sides played a regular contract, now in the practice of disciplining a contract – service level agreements (SLA).

“Arbeit und discipline”

Today, SLA is gaining popularity for building relationships between business and outsourcing companies. These agreements define the scope of work, the reaction rate, fees and fines, thus regulating the rights and obligations of the parties, and along with it, providing a high level of service from the service provider. Consequently, this kind of guarantee of service level, which is also the mechanism of insurance, paying user costs due to lower service levels.

Most of the large Ukrainian companies have been using global experience, in collaboration with IT outsourcers and actively enter into SLA. However, the market there are still companies that are in the translation business in the IT outsourcing have little understanding of what the contract SLA, quality of service which should appear in it, how to control the execution of such contract, and what responsibility is to provide an integrator. Of course, no experience in negotiating the content of the contract SLA and conflict resolution. Here is how to properly set up an agreement depends on the continued success of cooperation between the two sides. “In order to avoid failure of contracts, the company must ensure that it enters into a contract to provide services that meet their needs” – advises the head of service center IT-Solutions Alexander Yakushko.

Agreement on Rules of

According to system integrators, boilerplate contract governing the relationship between service provider and its client, can not be, but some moments are required for most contracts. Thus, making the concept of an agreement, you must clearly define the content of the service provided and to identify the participants involved in the agreement and the terms of its action.

You must also specify the availability of the service rules, including time spent on testing, ongoing support and upgrades. Important items in the contract – a detailed description of procedures for monitoring, reporting schedule of the service and the methods of troubleshooting. Negotiated and ways to upgrade and evolution of the service if it is intended to provide for the long term.

In addition, the SLA must be specified target levels of service quality. Experts advise in contracting primary attention to the point where the prescribed quantitative measurement of service quality, because quality is often a “stumbling block” between the customer and outsourcing company. It’s no secret that the main reason why companies are choosing IT outsourcing is the desire to reduce costs, but without losing the quality of services.

Other points of SLA, usually related to financial and legal regulation of cooperation: a description of fees associated with the service (perhaps as setting a single price for the entire service, and by level of service), defines the responsibility of customers using the service. According to Alexander Yakushko, the conclusion of SLA – a complicated process and can take up to a month. The most time-consuming procedure description and agree service level agreements, including the difficulty of measuring the indicators of interest to clients and other organizational processes.

In turn, customer orientation and an individual approach to drawing up SLA also affect its value. According to IT-Solutions, today the average cost of SLA-agreement depends on the quality of service provided. Thus, for SLA-agreement would have to pay 5-20% of the cost of equipment per year. Although SLA-agreement costs the customer a bit more expensive, it is most fully takes into account individual requirements, and usually involves a much greater volume of work. However, this is a modest charge for risk reduction to deferred maintenance.

SLA is accustomed to the Ukraine?

In the present situation, quality assurance and control of IT outsourcing is a very important issue for business owners. Such arrangements are widely used in the world, respectively, are inevitable and for the Ukrainian market. While due attention to the SLA on the Ukrainian market are paying relatively recent, we can say that the trend is firmly entrenched in our country. The reason for this is not only an increase in business culture, but also a desire to improve the quality of contracts for IT outsourcing. Each year, the company concluded an increasing number of agreements relating to the formalization of relations between business and IT, and it can be said that such agreements will in time become an integral part of relations between the two sides.