How to integrate SOW in your MSP successfully
Recently companies are increasingly looking for an integrated talent sourcing model to manage all temporary talent (staffing and professional) and Statement of Work (SOW) workers. They often want to expand their existing MSP programme with SOW management.
Traditionally SOW management was decentralised, largely controlled by the individual business units or departments who utilised the workers. However, without standardisation and internal controls, it's difficult to evaluate supplier and individual performance to get the best solution and talent at the best price.
What better than to expand your MSP programme and include a seamless addition of SOW? Talent acquisition and onboarding will provide a single integrated solution that delivers higher levels of programme governance, internal control, strategic insights, process efficiencies.
Success factors
Experience has shown us three success factors for the integration of your SOW programmes into your MSP programme:
- don’t underestimate the complexity and diversity of SOW agreements
- choose the right SOW pilot projects
- apply proper change management
Don't underestimate
You are about to add milestone-based services spend management to your MSP programme's portfolio. To come to an appropriate strategy, understanding the complexity of your SOW spend landscape and defining the proper target type of SOW’s are key. Do proper research before you start the strategic and operational discussion. Driven by the strategic direction, your VMS capabilities can also become a critical point.
Right pilot
Before you kick-off the whole programme start a number of pilots with SOW projects that you have defined as 'addressable SOW'. This way you can validate your assumptions as well as engage and convince hiring managers with some resistance. In general addressable SOW’s will be operational projects and projects work related without any material use, where suppliers are active in multiple categories. Extra work and extensions are also indicators to look for.
Change management
The biggest challenge when integrating SOW spend into a contingent workforce programme is having an effective change management strategy in place to support the implementation, as SOW is the domain of local BU stakeholders and business managers and not HR or procurement.
A TalentIn SOW quickscan helps you identify addressable SOW projects and validate assumed benefits in a (data based) business case. This SOW research is the base of your integrated strategy. In a period of four to six weeks we scan your SOW's, downselect four to six representative SOW's and deepdive in those to identify benefits and challenges. This will result in a high level advise and a related business case.
Author: Ron Bosma
