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

From deal to life cycle

The flexibility to extend outsourcing underlines the key distinction between outsourcing and M&A as tools for corporate reshaping. While M&A is perceived as a discrete one-off deal with a beginning, middle and end, and with a sense of ‘closure’ and finality on completion, outsourcing is a philosophy that opens the way to a logical and progressive continuum of change. This is why outsourcing is actually more appropriate than M&A to the idea of a ‘life cycle’. While the same skills apply in each case, a company engaged in ongoing outsourcing will find that it is applying all the skills at once in various initiatives, each at a different stage in its life cycle, rather than applying them in a sequential order as it does ...