What breaks when nobody is checking

The scorecard for an outsourced team measures the call.

Response within four hours. The weekly report delivered on the agreed day. Attendance at the Tuesday review. Every line on the service-level sheet, read closely, describes the vendor's behaviour when the client is present and asking.

None of it describes the vendor's behaviour when the client is not.

The Gulf is away until the second half of this month, and in most companies the weekly review has quietly lapsed until people are back. The reports still arrive, because reports are on the scorecard. But the account is running for a fortnight with nobody on the client side reading it, and what the vendor does in that fortnight is the actual service level, whatever the contract says.

I have managed outsourced teams from the platform side and from the client side, and the fortnight sorts them cleanly. On some accounts the creative keeps rotating, the offer that ended on the first is off the ads by the second, and someone notices that the landing page broke on a Thursday and fixes it before Sunday. On others the account sits exactly where the last call left it: the same three ads climbing in frequency, a promotion that ended on the first still running on the tenth, and a September deck that opens with the words: as you know, August was quiet.

Both teams will score the same on the sheet. Both replied within four hours; nobody wrote.

Nothing on the scorecard measures this, because the scorecard is filled in on the call, about the things the call covered. The week the call did not happen is invisible to it by construction.

Which is why I have stopped reading the weekly review as governance. The review was always going to be fine, because both sides prepare for it. Governance is what happens on the week there is no call.

August is that week.