The phase evaluates and initiates outsourcing opportunities and establishes and maintains an outsourcing strategy meeting business goals, so that the organization can fully assess the value and feasibility of the options, safeguard the process, minimise negative consequences and learn from experience. It typically starts when leadership sees an opportunity: in-house services too expensive, underperforming, below benchmark or unscalable; a new service the organization lacks the competence, time, budget or desire to develop; a current provider missing agreement terms; delivery no longer in line with strategy; or a contract nearing expiry, and the strategy can be reconsidered at any stage if the sourcing strategy changes or expected value is unachievable. A funnel approach identifies, validates and executes only opportunities that sustain business and sourcing strategy, with termination or exit from phase 4 fed back for alignment before renewal. The activities are to check prerequisites, understand eligible services, assess organizational impact, define the strategy, develop initial business cases, evaluate and decide, and set up the project; outputs are the outsourcing strategy, the initial business case, the decision document, and an execution plan worked out in detail for the following phase with high-level milestones for the rest.
The graph holds this control, the 0 it maps to, and the evidence behind each claim, over MCP and REST.