Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Risk questions for suppliers

To a large extent, risk mitigation for CEOs contemplating outsourcing is a matter of knowing the right questions to ask at the start – before the answers that you never asked for come back to haunt you. A good first step is to sit down with the potential outsourcing providers and ask these questions of each of them up front:

• Do the suppliers have genuine intimacy with and understanding of my industry, the application, operation or service?

• Have they travelled this route before (especially their board members)?

• If they have not, do they have the knowledge and scale to bring in whatever resources and subcontractors are needed to deliver the value?

• Can we check the suppliers’ client references personally? Can we conduct ...