A 12,000-employee Nordic company was watching its external IT costs rise year after year — not because services were getting more expensive, but because nobody was actively managing the contracts. We changed that.
The Challenge
The client’s IT function owned the full portfolio of supplier and partner relationships. Service Owners held individual responsibility for their agreements — but in practice, contract and IT vendor management sat somewhere between low priority and no priority.
The result was predictable: contracts auto-renewed without deliberate review, optimization efforts were sporadic at best, and external IT costs kept climbing without effective IT cost control. Nobody had a clear picture of what was under contract, at what price, or when decisions actually needed to be made.
The ask was clear enough in principle — take back control. In practice, it meant transforming the entire IT operating model: building the processes, tools and discipline that would make contract management and IT partner management a natural part of how Service Owners work every day, not an afterthought.
Checker’s Role
Checker Consulting led the IT transformation from first principles to go-live: mapping the current IT operating model, quantifying the cost of not managing contracts actively, designing and implementing a new way of working, and establishing an agreement repository that gave each Service Owner the visibility and prompts they needed to make conscious, timely decisions.
Our Approach
The work moved through three stages:
1. Mapping the current state
We mapped how Service Owners were actually working — not the theoretical process, but the real one — to build a representative baseline of the existing IT operating model and IT governance process. We pulled together the full agreement portfolio, collected yearly spend per contract, and documented how many times each had been prolonged without an active decision. That data built the “improvement loss” case: what drifting was costing versus what disciplined management and stronger IT cost control could deliver.
2. Designing the future state
Through workshops with the IT function, we identified and prioritized the value adds that mattered most in the short term. From that, we designed the processes, templates and tools to deliver them — establishing a structured IT vendor management process and building an agreement repository with filtering by Service Owner, clear milestone flagging, and automatic notifications timed to give enough runway before renewal, termination or renegotiation decisions came due.
3. Implementing
We ran classroom training on the new processes and templates across the team, went live with the repository, and established a complete contract and IT vendor management toolbox — templates covering prolongation, change requests, termination letters, disputes and more. The detail behind what we built, and how we drove adoption across a team of Service Owners with competing priorities, is worth a longer conversation.
The Results
The new IT operating model and IT governance process made contract management consistent across all Service Owners for the first time — not dependent on individual initiative, but built into how the work is done.
The shift in posture was visible: IT moved from being a back-seat driver — reacting to renewals and surprises — to actively steering, with full visibility and enough lead time to make real choices. Supplier and IT partner relationships improved alongside cost outcomes, and consolidation of duplicate or overlapping agreements removed complexity from the portfolio.
The financial result: an average 10% reduction in external IT spend — achieved not through renegotiation pressure or market testing, but simply by doing things in the right order, at the right time, with the right information in hand.
