#peter cheese

In the latest issue of People Management there is an interesting article by Carly Chynoweth on Outsouring entitled 'Its not all about the money'.  She quotes Mel Missen, HR vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Axicom Corporation who says about outsourcing "It is definitely not about cost saving, you can save on costs as a consequence, but if you start from that premise you are prioritising the wrong thing. You start with what your customers want, what they value and you look at whether you can offer that internally or externally, and which brings better value".

What really stuck in my mind was the comment 'its about what your customers want'.  I am a strong advocate that HR as a service should be designed as any other service would be designed with customers at the forefront.  This comment made me think about my experience on HR Transformation projects with outsourcing components, was the customer driving these decisions? No it was cost.  

If customer requirements are driving these decisions then the methodology that I have adopted within these outsourcing programmes should be different.  The design work should take place before the decision to outsource is made, this design work should inform what services should be outsourced and thus the manner in which the design work is approached should be different.  

I remember reading a book entitled Service Led design by Jane Saunders of Orion Partners where they provide an example of a service specification as a way of gathering information on business requirements.

This is interesting from a HR business process design methodology.  In my experience of process mapping workshops its all lines and boxes and the audience is predominately HR.  Making an outsourcing decision based upon the needs of the customer means that this needs to be a much more narrative conversation and all customers need to be represented particularly high volume users of the service; line managers and employees.  

This is however where the complexity can arise and the goals of standardization to realise cost efficiencies can be challenged.  As Peter Cheese the new CEO of the CIPD recognises when discussing Talent Management, "The real challenge now is to understand the different demographics, and tailor different propositions for different talent segments.  I think to borrow a notion from marketing, that "mass customisation" should be the eventual aim here - trying to understand everyone as an individual not just as a member of a demographic group".

On a previous client I did an interesting piece of work to analyse their HR customers and to give them a persona as you would in marketing, understanding and depicting their HR priorities. This could have then driven not only how the service was delivered to them but what that service consisted of.  Unfortunately this differentiation had a cost associated with it and had to be balanced with the goal to reduce costs.