Transition Management Consultants.

What is transition management?

Imagine the scenario… You have identified the need to move suppliers, or to a new service or contract with an existing supplier, and you may have run a tender to identify your new supplier. But how do you make the move so that it doesn’t affect your customer’s experience or impact your own budget?

Transition management is the practice of negotiating exit terms with your incumbent supplier and ensuring a managed and planned transition to the new supplier/contract.

Moving suppliers, or contracts, creates an additional layer of risk in your organisation, therefore a smooth business transition management process requires meticulous planning and considerable knowledge, skills and resources. The type of resource many organisations do not have just sitting around.

There is also level of people management involved as transition can be part of wider change management programmes. Aligning your internal team with any resulting change can be a project in itself.

This is why business transition management projects can become very complex and why many organisations choose to seek external support through consultants, like us.

The challenge of transition management.

Why does transition management pose such a challenge?

1. Managing the exit terms
   The existing supplier contract may be 3-5 years old and supplier relationship management may be ineffective, meaning no-one ‘owns’ or understands the terms.
2. Damaged relationships
   You may be moving suppliers as the relationship with the existing supplier is dysfunctional, or the service poor. Having a third party manage the transition can remove, or reduce emotional behaviours.
3. Limited resources
   As the process can become quite resource heavy, your existing team may not have the time or knowledge to fully manage the transition from old to new supplier.
4. Limited knowledge
   Not only do you need to understand the complexities of contract and supplier management, but also the category and organisational requirements of the new product or service, to ensure that there is no interruption in service or supply.
5. Communication
   Involving the key stakeholders during the transition process can be challenging. Engaging everyone who is affected by the change early and getting buy-in is a critical factor to the success.
6. Project management
   You need project management skills to ensure that there is scope for testing, back out strategies and migrations within your given timeframes. Sometimes these skills do not exist in-house.
7. Complexity
   Transition projects are complex because they often involve many processes, departments, people and procedures; often the service is truly organisational critical. These all have an impact on the organisation in different ways, from cost to culture.

A life-saving case study.

One example of such a complex transition was that of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH). They were challenged with transitioning from their fully outsourced IT contract to a new service provider, made even more testing by the fact that their IT solution was providing lifesaving services to critically ill patients. A system failure or outage just wasn’t an option. They needed not just a project manager to support the transition, but a full, flexible transition management consulting team onsite to help them manage the highly commercial transition from start to finish.

Without the existing skills in-house to support such a complex task, CUH sought the support of eXceeding to provide transition management consulting; to negotiate their exit strategy and manage their transition management methodology, whilst remaining cost conscious.

READ THE CASE STUDY

Transition management services from eXceeding.

Our specialist team of Prince2® qualified project managers can help with your transition management challenge. We can support your team with the additional people, time, skills and tools needed to ensure an effective, efficient and minimal risk move between suppliers.

Speak to us if you are looking for support in transitioning suppliers.