Most of IT big-budget, multi-year contracts are inked with months if not weeks of due diligence most often looking at the credentials of the firms and their leadership. Almost all of the big firms have exceedingly high reputation at their senior leadership levels with unmatched sincerity. Coming to smaller firms it takes them years to build that steadily one client at a time while they evolve to maintain their growth.

Let’s talk about the big firms specifically – The leadership enjoys high confidence among the corporates of the world for their sincerity for their willingness to work at personal levels to resolve differences, help clients concentrate on their business growth while they keep the IT shop humming leaders of IT, their accessibility and reach etc. Providers have won huge praise and awards from governments the world over for their contributions and their dedication in all sincerity.

There are ofcourse bad eggs in ever industry and IT is not insulated from it. Firms that promised much but didn’t deliver on the promise broke agreements and left clients in a lurch.

While the top leaders from IT providers develop long term relationships and grow the business the tasks of growing the holding the fort and delivery falls on the middle tier leaders often don’t follow the core principles their leadership used to bag the contracts and grow. The goals of middle tier is often grow their individual careers, look for short term revenue opportunities, one up man ship, unhealthy competition, poor client engagement, making untenable promises, politicking, pitting one against another, indulging in infighting, complaining on their client partnerships – just to name a few. Some are outright ill-qualified The analogy of “too big” to be thrown out of the client or multi-year contract also creates an atmosphere of protection for the middle tier leaders of the IT firms to be comfortable with.

This is one of the top issues that IT providers and their leaders struggle with but don’t make an issue for their clients to know that this exists. Often the middle level managers who are representatives of their leaders on client sites totally forget the principles of client engagement their bosses laid out and toe their own line often with negative consequences.

Aided by some of the negative pressures on outsourcing in developed countries from the locals this problems at times can spiral out of control. Some of the managers from IT providers are untrained and cannot fit in culturally or they reach client locations due to other considerations. Top tier IT firms have taken steps to train and mentor them before they join client sites which has helped alleviate this problem. However this exists in quite a good measure.

The vision and foresight to look at long term client relationship is not kept in view while dealing with day to day client engagement / client requests. A good part of the strategy of middle managers in IT firms is to look at making the quick buck forgetting the fact that these instances become a thorn in the flesh at growing business and actually exposes their firms to host of issues that come to bear during the renewal or extension of contracts and impede the growth of their organizations goals and objectives. Not to generalize there are few exceptions that actually end up rising to the top. The ability to sacrifice short term trivial benefit towards developing a relationship with the client for ever is often ignored. It takes a lot to bag a new client in the competitive market environment and retaining and growing it takes much more while losing the client due to short term opportunities at the cost of quality and client satisfaction is something IT providers should keep their eyes and ears open. If you study the growth of the global Big 3 consulting firms, their sole mantras has been towards keeping client interests very high on their radar and align to their long terms growth.

The philosophy of customer once – client forever, needs to be adopted by the IT Outsourcing firms and ensure everyone in their organization lives to their reputation to this motto.