Abstract

Nowadays, organizations view outsourcing as a strategy. Achieving world-class capabilities and facilities, long-term flexibility, improving operational performance, increasing productivity, low progress time, better using of equipment, increasing output can be considered as reasons for outsourcing. There are influential factors and criteria, which improve performance. Although outsourcing of services has many benefits, such as cost savings, making the affairs competitive, and reduced workforce, it is followed by some concerns. Despite the emphasis of different models in outsourcing and reviewing it, lack of sufficient practical criteria and appropriate model causes many shortcomings in terms of quality in providing services and desirable results and based on the experience of some organizations,outsourcing contracts are costlier than pervious status. The present study aimed identifying and prioritizing service outsourcing criteria and presenting a service outsourcing model in the General Directorate of Roads and Urban Development of Mazandaran Province in Iran. The research method is fundamental-applied in terms of objective and descriptive-survey in terms of method. The statistical population of the present study included the managers and experts and managers of General Directorate of Roads and Urban Development and the experts providing services to this general directorate in 2009. Researcher-made questionnaires were used to collect data. The face and content validities of this tool was confirmed by experts and its reliability was analyzed based on incompatibility coefficient less than 0.1. Research data were collected after distributing the questionnaires among individuals and then analyzed using Expert Choice software.The results showed that the service outsourcing criteria included evaluation and management, decision making and planning, and the criteria of evaluation and management had nine sub-criteria and each of the decision-making and management criteria had eight sub-criteria. Assessing the weight or degree of importance of service outsourcing criteria in this general directorate indicated that evaluation and management had the highest weight, followed by decision making and planning, respectively. After identifying the criteria and ranking them, the checklist prepared by the experts was distributed among the managers and experts of the general directorate and they were scores based on the defined weights. Then, the executive model was developed based on the obtained criteria and results to make organization more efficient and effective. Managers can use this model to take steps towards achieving the goals of the relevant organization.