To misquote Shakespeare: “To insource or “Last year, we had a strong return on the investment outsource” that is the question. Whether it is more in Insights as we were able to save 10% of our effective to use your own headcount resources to budget by conducting these projects ourselves.” undertake activities or more effective to outsource This statement does not tell the whole truth. It them? might have been the right decision from an ROI This is an important consideration for all Insights perspective (i.e., the team had the idle resources to leaders today. take on the projects), but it might also have caused Having spoken to numerous Insights leaders on this a negative ROI. For example, as our team had to topic, it is clear that there is no consensus on this manage x more projects the team were unable to matter. spend as much time on understanding the business issues and making recommendations for action to The matter is complicated by the fact that often the decision-makers on other important projects. project budget and headcount budget are not held Another consideration is that we have spoken with by the same person and are not subject to the same Insights leaders, who informed us that before in- rules. It is therefore difficult to switch flexibly between sourcing, their team previously had to spend a lot of the two. time briefing agencies and re-doing agency work Having said that, we think it is important for Insights so that they are now more efficient by bringing the leaders to approach this decision with “eyes wide project management in-house and actually freed open”, and in order to do so, they need to gain a up time by doing this. This obviously tells its own good understanding of both the spend budget ROI story about the challenges of creating a healthy and the headcount budget ROI. client-agency relationship, but that’s a subject for another handbook perhaps. What we do not want to see is the following ROI of As we said at the beginning of this section, there is Insights statement: no straightforward answer to this question. What