Competition
Beat the competition
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Even in the grace period following the initial setting up of a shared-services unit, you will still need to benchmark your services against those provided by third-party suppliers. But bear in mind that you do have some distinct advantages over external competition, such as open access to business plans, strategies, performance targets and other restricted information, as well as knowledge of how the organization actually makes decisions and gets things done. The key is networking and being open to information from a variety of sources, not just people, but the organization's intranet site, for example. This will help you formulate a picture of what your shared-services unit needs to, can and will do to make it indispensable.
What are your services for?Karl Albrecht, author of Service Within: solving the middle management leadership crisis, provides a useful start:
The starting point for figuring out what business you're in is the contribution your department can make to the overall success of the organization.
Forget about the functions you supposedly perform: auditing, transportation, mail delivery, purchasing and all the rest. Instead, think about contributions and outcomes: what is the desired result of what you do? What are you trying to make happen in the organization?
What situation would provide evidence of worthwhile effort on the part of your department?
If you know the contribution you want your department to make, you'll find it much easier to define, shape, plan and set objectives for the activities that should go on.
The following questions should help get answers for your services:
1) How will the unit's clients be better off, why will their jobs become easier, quicker or less complex, as a result of our activities?
2) How does this fit with the organization's overall objectives? This is a starting point for developing a benefit-based statement of your purpose.
3) Why does the organization pay us to do what we do? An uncomfortable question, but a direct way of getting to the heart of the issue.
4) What's the ultimate benefit of our activities? If you think your purpose is to produce cost estimates, think again!
'As a result of fast and accurate cost analysis, our clients in the sales department are able to bid with confidence on new contracts, faster than the competition, and with accuracy our customers can rely on,' is more to the point.
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