There are several impacts upon the quality of service that the outsourcer can be expected to provide.

The success of the initial analysis of your needs will depend upon your ability to recognize these impacts and to manage them.

Impacts of the structural hierarchy

In many organizations, the immediate impacts of the quality of service may be experienced at a relatively junior level. At increasingly higher levels of the organization, reporting is likely to be increasingly summarized and increasingly less current.

At the highest levels of the organization, the information received may be very highly summarized, so much so that it might be only in a financial format, and may be historical, as the process of conveying that information through the organization will have rendered it increasingly stale and out of date.

As the decisions about outsourcing may be taken at a strategic level, it is possible that those decisions will be made to people whose only perception of the service required is that provided by their summarized, historical view of current operations.

It is essential that this view does not set the tone for the service required. The information received by the highest levels of the structural hierarchy must not be allowed to dictate the information that is to be received by the organization as a whole.

Impacts of the reasons for outsourcing

The reasons that outsourcing has been decided as the direction for the organization will have impacts on the way that the outsourcer will be expected to operate.

In addition, whatever the reasons for the decision, the validity of those reasons to the effective running of the organization will also have impacts.

As an example, imagine that one of the reasons for outsourcing is to cut costs. It is clear that, of itself, the desire to cut costs will have an impact on the way that the outsourcer will be expected to operate. If the outsourcer manages to cut costs, the organization may still not be satisfied. This may because cutting costs was not really a valid reason for the organization to outsource. In this way, the decision has an impact on the way that the outsourcer works, but the validity of the decision will decide whether the organization is happy with the result.

Care must therefore be taken to ensure the decisions for outsourcing are the right ones for the organization.

Impacts of communication changes

Some changes to the way in which information is conveyed between the provider of a service and the organization's internal customers for that service will be experienced when the provider becomes an outsourcer.

In some areas where informal reporting was used before, the outsourcer will produce formal reports.

Managers will no longer be able to stop the service provider in a corridor or in the lunch room to ask "How are things going?" Instead, they will receive regular, formal reports on the outsourcer's performance.

Impacts of service specification

The fact that the organization will have to specify the services that the outsourcer will provide may mean that changes to those services will be identified. In some cases, changes to other services may also be identified.

An organization that runs a vehicle fleet through its Office Services department may also make bookings of hire cars through its Travel Services department for staff flying to other cities. The outsourcer may be able to handle both of these functions and arrange for parking of fleet vehicles at airports.

A service such as "vehicle management" may therefore be extended to cover services not previously regarded as being within the organization's definition of "vehicle management".