ESCM-SP

eSCM-SP is a best practice capability model for service providers in IT-enabled sourcing, which can be used as both an improvement roadmap and as a certification standard.

Audience
Providers of IT-enabled services and their clients; the service provider can be internal or external.

Property
eSCM-SP (eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers) is owned and supported  by ITSqc, a spin-off from the Carnegie Mellon University. Version 1.0 was released in 2001; the current version is version 2.02 (2009).

Summary
The model has three purposes: to give service providers guidance that will help them improve their capability across the sourcing life-cycle, to provide clients with an objective means of evaluating the capability of service providers, and to offer service providers a standard to use when differentiating themselves from competitors.

Each of the model 84 practices is distributed along three dimensions:
 * Sourcing Life-cycle,
 * Capability Area,
 * and Capability Level.

Capability Areas provide logical groupings of Practices to help users better remember and intellectually manage the contents of the Model. Service providers can then build or demonstrate capabilities in a particular critical-sourcing function. The ten capability areas are: The following picture shows the distribution of practices per capability area and sourcing lifecycle step. Most practices are used during all the sourcing lifecycle (‘ongoing’). The five eSCM-SP Capability Levels indicate the level of an organization capability. They roughly follow the CMMI framework: Level 1 indicates that the organization is providing a service. A Level 2 organization has procedures in place to enable it to consistently meet its clients’ requirements. At Level 3, an organization is able to manage its performance consistently  across engagements. Level 4 requires that an organization is able to add value to its services through innovation. Service providers at Level 5 have proven that they can sustain excellence over a period of at least two years, and have demonstrated this through successive certifications. =Strenghts and limitations=
 * Knowledge Management,
 * People Management,
 * Performance Management,
 * Relationship Management,
 * Technology Management,
 * Threat Management,
 * Service Transfer,
 * Contracting,
 * Service Design & Deployment, and
 * Service Delivery.

There is no market sector nor service area out of scope. Moreover, eSCM-SP has been designed to complement existing frameworks and quality models.

Strengths
Most quality models focus only on design and delivery capabilities: the eSCM-SP Sourcing Lifecycle is more comprehensive, including Initiation and Completion of the contract. Both phases are often the most critical to successful sourcing relationships. The Sourcing Lifecycle also includes Overall Practices, which span through all the Lifecycle phases. eSCM-SP is complemented by eSCM-CL (for Clients). The two models are consistent, symmetrical and complementary for each side of the client-provider relationship. They should be used to ensure alignment of processes and of maturity/capability levels to build stronger partnerships.

Limitations

 * No guidance on metrics to be collected; organisations should define and collect the metrics that they wish to use to manage their service delivery and relationships.
 * Provide requirements for establishing service management processes, rather than providing processes. But this is well done by other frameworks, such as ITIL, we may use for that purpose.

More…
Official publication: Mark C. Paulk & Elaine Hyder & Keith M. Heston & Bill Hefley, eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers, ISBN 9789087535612, Van Haren Publishing.