Outsourcing Performance Tuning.
Recovering a live agentic engagement that is drifting.
3 months · fixed-fee, fixed-scope, fixed-deliverable · The executive who owns the engagement
The clinic in brief.
An honest, buyer-held baseline.
The clinic recovers a live agentic AI engagement that is underperforming or drifting toward cancellation. Co-management becomes the primary success factor once an engagement reaches production. The study puts the failure there. Governance depends on accurate delivery data. The bank’s Compliance, Oversight, Regulatory, and Legal (CORAL) obligations depend on it too. Few banks hold that data cleanly. The clinic builds an honest, buyer-held performance baseline, sets it against what the vendor reported, and returns a prioritized 30-60-90 recovery plan.
When co-management breaks down.
- A live agentic engagement is drifting toward cancellation.
- The vendor’s reporting cannot be trusted. Respondents rated bank-facing reporting more likely to be manipulated (6.26/10) than accurate (4.81/10).
- Co-management has broken down since the engagement reached production.
- The bank cannot see what the agents are doing across the firm boundary.
Co-management, oversight, and reporting integrity.
- Co-management between bank and vendor. The joint operating model, the cadence, and the decision rights that run the engagement day to day.
- Human oversight and agent governance. The human-in-the-loop controls, the rules on what agents may do without approval, and the change process the oversight layer must keep pace with.
- Performance and reporting integrity. Governance and CORAL depend on accurate delivery data. The clinic sets an honest, buyer-held baseline against what the vendor reported.
- Cross-firm visibility. What the bank can see of the vendor’s agents across the boundary.
- Risk, issue, and dispute resolution. How problems are caught, escalated, and closed at machine speed.
Three months, evidence-led throughout.
The clinic runs three months, evidence-led throughout. Akholi anchors to the executive sponsor, then gathers evidence from both sides: interviews, a scored survey, the vendor’s raw source data, the bank’s own shadow records, and the contract and governance documents. Reported performance is re-derived from source data, not accepted from the vendor’s summary. The gap between the documented reality and the practiced reality is the finding.
What the sponsor receives.
One report to the sponsor:
- An honest, buyer-held performance baseline.
- A prioritized inventory of findings.
- A 30-60-90 recovery plan, each action with an owner and an acceptance test.
- The KPIs to track the recovery.
Optional — Phil Hatch activation
Phil Hatch can lead the recovery. He chairs the co-management reset, holds the baseline, and drives the 30-60-90 plan.
The Practice
All clinics →Crisis Response
An engagement in acute failure. Phil Hatch engages the executive team within 24 hours of contact.
Retained Advisory
Standing senior counsel across the outsourcing and global capability center portfolio.