Price $1,450.00 Member Price $1,305.00

This Research Note is the first of our Consulting Services Sourcing & Procurement Insight Series, where we interview leaders of global procurement organizations and discuss consulting category management best practices.

This Research Note profiles the practices of Alcatel•Lucent, a $22 billion Paris-based provider of communication technologies, applications, and services, with approximately 78,000 employees globally.

Monadnock Research interviewed Mario Visco, the company's Director of Indirect Spending, in April 2009 to discuss his perspectives on procurement of consulting services. Visco is based in the US, and has responsibility for America's spending on professional services, and also has "vertical" responsibility for the category globally.

In this Research Note the following questions were answered for Alcatel•Lucent's internal consulting services sourcing and procurement programs:

• What trends do you see in demand for consulting services today and how are you responding to those trends?
• How would you characterize Alcatel•Lucent's consulting category management maturity?
• When you review an RFP submitted by a consultancy what do you normally look for in terms of value?
• What policies, procedures, and practices do you employ to extract more value from consulting projects?
• Do you have a specific threshold that is used to help guide users and procurement for when a competitive bid is to be performed? For example, any project over $100,000 must be competitively bid.
• Do you employ alternatives to external consultants?
• Can you highlight some of the innovative clauses and/or terms and conditions that you have incorporated into consulting agreements and statements of work?
• When you refer to your standard agreements, do you require all consultancies to sign those agreements, or do you sometimes sign a firm's standard consulting agreement?
• What are some of the top errors sourcing professionals make when drafting consulting contracts?
• What are the biggest challenges that are facing consulting category management sourcing and procurement professionals today?
• What advice can you give to companies that are in the process of designing and developing consulting category management processes?
• Are consultants changing the way they sell services to clients in light of the recession? Are project compensation schemes changing? What methods/structures are becoming more prevalent and why?
• What needs do you see emerging that will require consultancies to develop new capabilities and offerings to satisfy requirements?
• Can you describe the procurement group structure within your company, and where consulting services procurement reports within it?
• Is Alcatel•Lucent's sourcing and procurement centralized or decentralized?

This White Paper is 13 pages in length. Delivery via PDF. Includes enterprise license for procurement group and internal users for any size non-consulting organization. Consulting firms and internal consulting operations must call for a license quotation based on number of professionals. MR.net client discount applied at checkout (10 percent for this item). Use email address on-file at checkout to receive discount.