users: The technical SLAs were generally being met, but
Schaeffer employees expected more—especially when it
came to resolving their desktop support problems.
Before the contract, Schaeffer’s employees could call
their own centralized help desk, and their issues would
often be addressed over the telephone during the first
call. But ABC’s processes called for new help desk
requests to first be logged into their support system.
Problem tickets were then issued, which were then prior-
itized and assigned to an ABC technician. The personal
touch that symbolized Schaeffer was lost after the out-
sourcing deal with ABC:
People used to walk down the hallway and say, “Hey,
can you come over here and look at this?” And I had
to now say, “I am sorry—if you can put in a ticket, I
will come back and look at it.”
—Larry Brown, Desktop Support TechnicianAlthough ABC was a Tier 1 outsource service
provider, the vendor’s ticketing system for help desk calls
and the support levels that Schaeffer had purchased led to
performance gaps with user expectations. One of the many
Schaeffer employee names for the help desk was the “help-
less desk.”
Citing poor performance by ABC and mounting
cost pressures at the Colbert division in particular,
Schaeffer renegotiated with ABC to exclude desktop
support from the contract. From ABC’s perspective,
desktop support was the least profitable part of its con-
tract with Schaeffer, and it had subcontracted some of
the work to a small regional vendor located close to
Schaeffer’s divisions. ABC, therefore, readily accepted
the contract change without termination fines.
But Schaeffer’s management then faced the dilemma
of who would provide desktop support for Schaeffer. At first,
they considered using the same regional vendor that ABC
had used, but this idea was abandoned due to concerns about
the survival of the small outsourcing company. Instead, the
decision was made to bring all of the desktop support back
in-house. The IT support personnel that were moved to ABC
as part of the original outsourcing deal became Schaeffer
employees again. Essentially, this meant that the ABC
personnel that had been located in the basement of the
Colbert facility were moved to the same floor as other
Colbert IT employees, and the desktop support activities
were now managed by this division for all of Schaeffer.
As part of this change, Colbert’s IT managers set up
new SLAs for its internal workers. During the ABC contract,
80 percent of the desktop support issues were to be resolved
in the time specified, but Colbert changed this to 95 percent.
For example, under the ABC contract 80 percent of level 1
issues were to be resolved within four hours, and under
Colbert’s new SLA 95 percent of level 1 issues were to be
resolved within four hours. The quality of the service for
Schaeffer’s desktop and remote users, which had been one
of the primary sources of user dissatisfaction with the ABC
contract, increased dramatically—even exceeding the new
95 percent targets for 24-hour resolution (see Exhibit 2).
Morale improved after I came back here. ABC is just
such a big company—it was “No Ticket—No
Work.” Schaeffer people hated that, because they
were so used to me walking down the hall to fix an
issue. Now, we are given the liberty to respond if60%65%70%75%80%85%90%95%100%May
MonthSev 3 w/in 24 hours
TargetOct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar AprOn Time CompletionsEXHIBIT 2 Compliance Statistics for Severity 3 Desktop Support
Under New TargetCase Study IV-4 • IT Infrastructure Outsourcing at Schaeffer (B): Managing the Contract 639