Outsourcing Leadership Blog

Solving the Root Cause Finger-Pointing Conundrum

Posted by Chuck Rosenfield on Monday, 29 March 2010 14:10

Digg it |

Delicious |

Facebook |

Twitter

Categories: Outsourcing

For complex IT problems, uncovering and validating the root cause can be challenging. This is especially the case when coordination between multiple IT departments is required (e.g., it’s unclear whether the root cause lies in the infrastructure or application support space). It can become even more challenging when some of those support services are provided in-house and some of them are provided by different outsourcing service providers. The outsourcing buyer has brought in the expertise provided by the outsourcers, but their experts have differing opinions…

As an outsourcing buyer, has your company’s IT operations ever run into this situation?

Provider 1 is missing its SLAs and identifies the root cause as Provider 2’s performance. Of course, Provider 2 has the opposite view. When working with two or more outsourcing service providers that propose completely different hypotheses of a Root Cause of a problem, the answer is: “They both can’t be right.”

This is a Project Management and Vendor Management Organization (VMO) nightmare that is materially impacting your company. Quick fixes are necessary, and safeguards must be put in place, so that it will not repeat itself again or create new issues. What do you do? Finger pointing is easy as each one supports its Root Cause Analysis, but treatment of symptoms and inherent problems are only resolved combining the respective observations into one answer. At the end of the day, there may be many components, but by definition “There is only one Root Cause.”

Creating active dialogue is necessary. Not just for putting out the fire that’s currently blazing, but to reduce the firefighting effort going forward. Collaborative sessions with representatives from all parties can help manage conflict and eliminate, or at least streamlines, the number of potential issues/challenges that may occur that prevent outsourcing success. But how do you keep the session from devolving into a finger pointing exercise?

Alsbridge has developed and executed proven methodologies for structured collaborative SAS sessions that ensure operational alignment in single vendor and multiple vendor relationships. Establishing operational alignment allows everyone to understand the lines of responsibility, prepares them to identify the Root Cause of problems and arrive at the same answer, and facilitates rapid resolution and smoother relationship(s) between the respective service providers and the outsourcing buyer’s governance team.
Please share your Root Cause conflict experiences in the comments and feel free to contact Alsbridge to discuss what we can bring to your business relationships.

back to blog

Comments

#2 C. Robert Nelms 2010-04-10 06:56 Other industries have vast experience with Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and have been dealing with the finger pointing issue, and other issues, for decades. From this perspective, I'd like to offer two thoughts. First, please reconsider your statement "there is only one root cause." Unless you are talking about "the human condition," there are many, many factors that contribute to everything that goes wrong in this life of ours — not matter what the industry or event in question. Secondly, everything that goes wrong in the systems we design can be traced to people (which is why finger pointing is so rampant). This being the case, many "rooticians" have learned to BAN "blame" in their investigations — but instead to REQUIRE INTROSPECTION. Everyone involved is to answer the question "what is it about the way you are that contributed to this event?"

Thanks so much for your post, and for allowing comments.

Have a great day. Quote

#1 EricF 2010-04-07 19:32 No conflicts to share, but a strong project management and workflow process has always seemed to cut down on the possibility of said conflicts. Quote

Refresh comments list
RSS feed for comments to this post.