What should be agreed before moving work into shared services?

Identify the activity and its dependencies

Map the work at a level that makes the proposed move clear. Establish the inputs, outputs and volumes, along with the systems and hand-offs required.

Look at variation across clients and the operating cycle. A process that appears consistent in a high-level description may contain different requirements when an exception occurs or demand increases.

This helps distinguish a whole-role move from the transfer of selected tasks. It also exposes support that can otherwise remain invisible, such as an experienced colleague correcting an upstream problem.

Define the retained organisation

The existing team’s future responsibilities need the same attention as the receiving team’s new activity.

Agree who will handle exceptions, provide specialist decisions, manage the client relationship and own overall service performance. Consider how absence, peaks in demand and different working hours affect those responsibilities.

A clear retained model makes it easier to see the real effort required after the transition.

Connect approvals to the proposed scope

Identify the business and specialist decisions needed for the activity. The responsible legal, privacy, security and client-account owners should determine the requirements for the specific situation.

Record the activity each decision affects and when the response is needed. If a decision changes the scope, revisit the staffing, training and benefit assumptions connected to that work.

Prepare recruitment and training together

Recruitment should follow a clear view of the required capability. Training needs a plan that reflects the activity people will actually perform, including exceptions and escalation routes.

Confirm the systems and access needed for training, the availability of experienced staff and how supervised practice will work. Where the plan relies on onshore support, make that capacity visible.

Establish the evidence for handover

Agree the measures that will show whether the receiving operation is ready. Depending on the service, these may cover processing quality, throughput, exception handling and performance against service requirements.

During dual running, consider those measures alongside the support still required from the existing team. A service may appear stable because experienced colleagues are quietly resolving problems. That effort needs to be understood before operational acceptance.

Keep the benefit case connected to delivery

The expected benefit changes if the organisation retains more work, extends training or adds support and technology costs.

Work with the finance owner to distinguish the forecast from benefits already recognised. Keep the assumptions visible so that changes in the operating model lead to a deliberate update to the business case.

A useful transition plan gives everyone a common view of what is moving, the conditions for moving it and who will own the service afterwards.