GBS
Transition

Lift and Shift moves a process as-is to the GBS center and optimizes later. Transform and Transfer redesigns the target state before migration.

• Most successful programs use a hybrid: tactical Lift and Shift for early waves to build credibility, Transform and Transfer for subsequent waves.
• The choice shapes your timeline, risk profile, and whether you end up running a cost center or a transformation engine.

Due diligence verifies what you are actually transitioning — volumes, complexity, systems, exceptions, dependencies, and people.

• The gap between what the business case assumed and what due diligence reveals is where transition timelines and budgets die.
• Never skip it. The cost of discovering surprises mid-transition is 10x the cost of finding them upfront.

Gate reviews are formal checkpoints where a steering committee decides whether a transition is ready to proceed to the next phase. Each gate has entry criteria (what must be true) and exit criteria (what must be complete). Passing a gate without meeting criteria — which happens under time pressure — is the single most common cause of transition failures.

The four phases in sequence:

• Phase 1 — Shadow: receiving team watches the sending team (watch and learn).
• Phase 2 — Reverse Shadow: receiving team executes while the sending team watches (do and correct).
• Phase 3 — Handover: receiving team operates independently with support available.
• Phase 4 — Sign-off: formal acceptance that knowledge transfer is complete.
• Skipping phases or compressing timelines produces a team that executes the happy path but panics at the first exception.

Both sides carry real tension — and both are right.

• The sending team often feels their jobs are being taken.
• The receiving team feels overwhelmed by unfamiliar processes.
• Managing this requires acknowledging what people are losing, providing clarity on what comes next, and creating space for the emotional reality of change alongside the operational plan.

SAC defines the objective conditions under which the receiving team formally accepts ownership of a transitioned process. It typically includes accuracy rates, processing volumes, exception handling capability, and documentation completeness. Without SAC, the moment of handover becomes a negotiation. With SAC, it is a measurement.

Hypercare is the intensive support period immediately after go-live — typically 4–12 weeks.

• Sending team remains available; escalation paths are shortened; performance is monitored daily.
• Exit criteria define when hypercare ends and normal operations begin.
• Exiting too early creates risk. Staying too long creates dependency.

Baselining establishes the new team's performance benchmark after transition — processing times, error rates, SLA compliance, and stakeholder satisfaction.

• The baseline is not compared to the pre-transition state (which had years of optimization) — it is the starting point for the new team's continuous improvement journey.
• Setting the right baseline prevents unfair comparisons and unrealistic expectations.

Operational resilience is the ability to maintain service delivery when things go wrong — system outages, staff shortages, data center failures.

• Resilience planning in GBS includes: manual fallback procedures, cross-trained staff, geographic redundancy, and tested recovery playbooks.
• The organizations that recover fastest are the ones that planned for failure before it happened.