If IT services are outsourced to service providers, these also have to be managed. The provider manager plays a central role in the organization of the outsourcing company. He is the central contact person for a service provider, monitors its performance and initiates any necessary service changes. After specifying the role and selecting the personnel, the question arises: How to train provider managers? In the following, we outline a set of training and development measures for this purpose. We also outline how the appropriate measures can be selected depending on the level of knowledge and experience.
In our blog post “Multi Provider Management: trainings as the basis for success”, we described how to develop and implement a training concept for employees who work in multi provider management. In this article, we want to focus on the contents of the continuing education concept for the provider manager. We will use the term “provider manager” to refer to the role as defined in our blog post “IT service manager versus provider manager – what’s the difference?“: the central operational coordinator or manager for a provider to whom services have been outsourced.
The following training concept will not only include training courses, but a set of different development measures. The aim is to ensure the continuous and efficient development of the employee who takes on this role.
We will first take a look at the essential skill requirements needed in the role and then derive development measures from these.
Skill Requirements for Provider Managers
The specific scope of a provider manager’s duties depends on the nature of his or her role within the company. As a rule, he assumes the following tasks:
- Monitor the performance of the provider,
- Coordinate and initiate necessary changes and projects with the provider,
- Control risks and compliance conformity of external services,
- Initiate improvements,
- Review invoices and monitor budget.
For his tasks he needs sufficient social and leadership skills, as he has to establish a good cooperative relationship with the provider. That is a prerequisite to be able to manage him efficiently. In addition, he needs the technical basics from various fields of knowledge: he must understand contracts in order to know what has been agreed with the provider. He needs basic commercial knowledge to deal with orders, invoices and budgets. And finally, managing external IT services requires a generalist’s knowledge of the current state of information technology and service management.
Figure 1 lists the required skills in detail.
Figure 1: Required skills for provider managers
Development measures for provider managers
So how can you train provider managers? For the development of personnel, often only training courses and specialist seminars are considered as measures in the first step. But it is more effective to combine different measures and to match them exactly to the experience and competence status of the employee to be developed.
A skill requirement profile for the role to be filled can serve as the basis for this: the required (TARGET) skills shown in Figure 1 are classified for the specific position of a provider manager on a scale from 1 (=low) to 5 (=high). Based on the skill requirement profile, the employee intended for the role is assessed with his current (ACTUAL) skill level. Subsequently, an action plan is to be created to close the skills with larger gaps between TARGET and ACTUAL.
For a newcomer to the subject area, basic seminars on IT vendor management and IT service management (ITIL) are recommended at the beginning in order to gain an overview of the task area.
Subsequently, suitable measures for the status of the individual employee can be combined from the “seminars”, “familiarization”, “exchange of experience” and “view of documentation” classes and scheduled in a sequence that makes sense in terms of time. Examples of possible development measures are shown in Figure 2.
In practice, the “appropriate” measures are usually planned together with the supervisor. After initial planning, a review of the development progress can then take place in annual employee appraisals with the supervisor and the development planning for the next cycle can then take place or be updated.
The annual employee appraisal also offers the opportunity to request feedback from the supervisor for a longer period of time and thus to supplement insights gained from situational feedback from supervisors and colleagues.
Figure 2: Examples of potential development measures
Some measures are also useful after the initial familiarization phase and should be retained. These include, in particular, the measures in the “Exchange of experience” class. Feedback can also be attached to every committee meeting with providers as a standard element. This gives the opportunity to receive valuable improvement tips from provider representatives as well. In addition, such feedback is also an element to develop the shared relationship.
Over time, the “documentation” area develops for the employee from an initial source of knowledge to a pool of information regularly used in day-to-day operations.
Conclusion
So how to train provider managers ? The role of the provider manager requires a variety of different skills, depending on how it is defined in the company. And the provider manager is more of a management function than an expert function. Since there is no standard training program for provider managers, companies must develop and implement their own training concepts.
It makes sense to fill such a position with an employee who already has some essential knowledge and experience. For example this can be an IT employee who is familiar with service management and project management. In addition it is desirable that he have already had some management experience. Equally conceivable, however, is an employee from a commercial area with project management and IT experience. When filling the role, it should be essential that the employee finds this role an interesting challenge for him or herself.
If the right set of development measures is then implemented to enable employees to successively close their competence gaps, nothing stands in the way of successful provider management and, as a result, good external IT service.
