A typical customer-provider relationship is never an easy one. Both parties seek to extract the maximum for themselves in an ostensibly win-win situation. Months of negotiations usually end up in a customer selecting a provider who meets most of its requirements, and then ties up the provider to documents that list out a number of do's and don'ts and a set of expectations unexcitingly called Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Both parties part at this note, with the customer going home feeling that his headaches are now someone else's, and the provider figuring out how to extract most of the business with the hope of scaling it up for future gains.
Thankfully, real life successful sourcing arrangements are not as cut and dried. They are not devoid of a heart and a soul. The customer could be sitting 10,000 miles away from the provider, but in many cases there is actually lot of hand holding, particularly as regards human resources — the people at the provider's end who work towards the customer's engagement.
