One of the most important services offered by GBS is the seamless migration of processes. A key concern is how to ensure the work you moved into GBS continues to provide the same service levels you are used to seeing, how to maintain the communication with the new team, and how to avoid business disruptions down the road.
The expected benefits of GBS, such as savings, standardization, scalability, and process improvements, are very attractive, leading the Company to make the decision to move over some processes to GBS. However, after migrating the activities, there are many concerns and even pain points that arise from the Sending Organization.
Migrating work to GBS is not about moving a task. The following are considerations you should weave into your transition plan to enable the Sending Organization to get delighted with their new partnership with GBS.
Build a network with the entire ecosystem
Ensure to map out the customers and suppliers related to the tasks you are migrating, and enable networking opportunities with them. Very often the activity mapping emphasizes capturing the tasks, time consumed, inputs, outputs, metrics, step by step documentation, systems and tools, and the key contacts related to the tasks. While all of those are a must, seldom the teams take the time to understand and train the GBS members on who are all the departments that use the data, who can help support when there is an out of the ordinary issue, and, who are all the relevant clients of your services.
It is very important to understand the tasks migrated do not exist in a bubble, they are part of processes which are interconnected with a complete ecosystem, therefore it is very important to build a relationship with teams across the total Organization.
Understand the importance of each task and how they fit into the end to end process
Set up time with the experts on the Organization so they can walk the team through the big picture. They can explain how the particular tasks impact the Organization and can give a deeper sense of how the processes migrated enable the Company to reach their goals.
As part of the deep dive, ensure to identify the typical issues of the process and how to fix them. Also, ensure to confirm that the process documentation includes events that happen seasonally, as well as those that take place only once a year.
A good technique to understand how a particular task fits into the total process, is to ask questions like what happens if the task is done in a different way, and why the task is done by this particular department.
Provide “culture” training
Whether the team members are completely new to the Company or just new to the specific processes being migrated, you should be very intentional on building the right level of understanding of the Sending Organization’s culture. This includes understanding how the hierarchy is managed; how they typically communicate (via email, via meetings, with presentations, with one pagers); what are their top concerns; what are their key goals; who are the key customers.
An aspect that is often missed, is to also understand the culture of the external users of the GBS services such as Suppliers. You need to equip the team with the right skills so they can provide an excellent experience when interacting with the Organization and the external Clients.
Often the team is well trained on the process and the systems, but they need to learn how to interact with the customers. Help the team to learn the particularities of the market, specially the key words the clients are familiar with. This is particularly important when the GBS is located in another Country, even if they speak the language, they might use words that are either too technical or considered not polite enough.
A good approach here, is to shadow some of the experts while they interact with the internal and external Clients specially to get a feel on how to handle difficult situations.
To note, if the team is being rebadged, meaning the same team doing the work today is moved to GBS to continue doing the tasks, you should make sure to provide an On-boarding that helps the team members get familiar with the GBS culture as well, including its protocols, principles, and ways of working.
Be very clear regarding Ownership
The GBS Team members must understand from Day One that they are not just responsible for executing a task. Their process doesn’t start with step one of the job aid or standard procedure, and it doesn’t end with the final step listed there either.
Their task has upstream and downstream interdependencies. When one of those fails, the GBS process fails as well, in those scenarios the fix of the issue typically depends on someone that is not within GBS. Even if this is the case, as GBS is the owner of the task outcome, the expectation is for GBS to be accountable for making sure the gap gets resolved.
Issues where the GBS task owner assumes the Sending Organization owns it, tend to linger open for a long time, leading to frustration on both ends as the resolution is not a priority for either team. Actually, the sending Organization understands they should help but they expect GBS to do the analysis, provide recommendations and solution alternatives, set up the plan, get the funding / approvals; in summary, lead all the steps required to fix the issue. To achieve this, having the right network and understanding how the task fits into the end to end process really helps.
Next time you are planning to transition new work into GBS, ensure to add the activities described into your master plan. This will round up the profile of the team members migrating the tasks in a way that they can delight the customers and become reliable and valuable partners to the Sending Organization.