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Interview with Lizzy McComish, GSDM @ Microsoft

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Welcome to the Design Talk podcast. We are interested in exploring the practical challenges of learning and growing the "know who, know where, know why, know what, know how, know about" in organisations. Particularly the kinds of practices or behaviours we will need to interact with and manage global partners, and ultimately to be a global partner.

We are thrilled to be joined today by Lizzy McComish. Lizzy is a Global Service Delivery Manager at Microsoft.

What does the GSDM role cover?

Talk about the soft skills that are needed to succeed in this line of work?

On vendor selection, what types of services are suited to outsourcing?

Key factors when making an outsourcing decision?

Does culture play a role?

If you walked into a new client-side engagement, and you looked at the existing supply management team. Have you ever said “oh, that's great, I can see this is run well”?

What are the features of a well-run team?

What practices do you expect to see?

You have said “If i'm not successful, they [vendor] aren’t successful” Could you talk a little more about that idea and your role as the in-between client and the vendor?

When it comes to making the vendors feel as part of Microsoft, how does that actually work in practice?

Managing Knowledge & Training: if on a vendor side, if a staff member was absent for an extended period and if it led to significant issues...

How do you approach training when it comes to your vendors?

Is shadowing a key practice? How does it work, what benefits do you find?

Is the link between metrics and relationships negative or can they reinforce productively?

Any tips on managing the vendor relationship, particularly transitioning between an incoming and an outgoing vendor?

Closing

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Acknowledgements, License

Music

Title: “’Intro 1 Delay Classic”

Artist: “Ivan Šipek”

Source: personal copy

License: “CC BY”

Cover Art

Title: “Cover Art”

Artist: “Anastasia Kucerovska”

Source: personal copy & image clip art via Canva (canva.com)

License: “CC BY”

The `Design Talk (dot IE)’ podcasts are released under the “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike version 4.0 creative commons license aka CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you are entering a verbal agreement giving permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast available from Acast and wherever people get their podcasts.

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Daily Audio Proverb February 04