Congratulations. You did it.
You convinced the Board. You secured the investment. You cut the ribbon on a shiny new Global Capability Center (GCC) in Bangalore or Warsaw, issuing the press release about your new internal “Center of Excellence.”
Take a moment. Enjoy the applause.
Now, brace for impact. The easy part is over.
You are about to enter the most dangerous phase of the entire initiative: repatriating critical work from an entrenched incumbent vendor into your new, unproven team.
If you think this is just a large-scale project management exercise, your business case is already dead on arrival. You aren’t managing a migration; you are managing a hostile divorce where the other party holds the keys to your operations.
Here is the reality check your internal teams are too afraid to give you about the transition ahead.
1. The Vendor Will Not Go Quietly.
For the last decade, your incumbent outsourcing partner has embedded themselves into your IT stack. They know where the bodies are buried. More importantly, they know that you don’t.
The moment you announced the GCC, you became an existential threat to their P&L. They will not overtly sabotage you—that’s breach of contract. Instead, they will weaponize incompetence and delay. Knowledge Transfer (KT) sessions will become exercises in vague generalities, and key personnel will suddenly be reassigned.
They want the transition to be so painful that you are forced to extend their contracts “just for another six months” to keep the lights on.
2. The “Lift and Shift” Delusion.
Your internal leaders are telling you they can just move the Jira tickets and the code repos from Vendor A to your new GCC team. This is a fantasy.
If you “lift and shift” a bloated, inefficient, vendor-managed mess into your new captive center, you haven’t solved anything. You have just taken ownership of the mess. You are importing bad habits and technical debt directly into your new organization.
3. The Financial “Dual-Run” Bomb.
Your business case promised massive savings by Year 2. But did that business case realistically account for a vendor who wants you to slow down?
You will be facing an extended period of “dual-running”—paying full price to the incumbent vendor while simultaneously paying full salaries for your new GCC team to shadow them. When the vendor drags their feet on KT, that dual-run period blows up, and your “cost-saving” initiative starts hemorrhaging cash.
You Need Leverage at the Exit Table.
Your internal VMO and procurement teams are set up to buy software and renew contracts. They are not equipped for the guerilla warfare of a massive strategic exit.
The ribbon cutting is over. The real fight starts tomorrow.
