Skip to content
Delivery assurance
02.4

Externally provided processes and services

Where activities that affect the asset have been placed outside the organisation, has the organisation retained the ability to know whether they were done?

What goes wrong without it

Outsourcing transfers activity, not accountability, and the gap between the two is where assurance quietly stops. The 2024 edition widened the requirement deliberately, from outsourcing to externally provided processes, products, technologies and services, which now captures arrangements most organisations never treated as outsourcing at all: platforms, data services, proprietary systems whose behaviour the owner cannot inspect.

What to examine

  • List what has been externally provided, including technologies and data services, not only contracted works and consultancy.
  • For each, identify what the organisation retains that lets it verify performance independently of the provider.
  • Check whether the owner holds more or less programme information than its tier one contractors. Where the imbalance is wide, note it as a transfer risk crystallising at handover rather than as a delivery issue.
  • Confirm the contract requires the information the owner will need to operate, and not merely the information the provider finds convenient to produce.

Required by

  • ISO 55001:2024, Clause 8.3, externally provided processes, products, technologies and services, retitled from Outsourcing in the 2014 edition. ISO/TC 251 states the change follows the ISO Harmonized Structure and does not substantially change the requirements.
  • PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, November 2025, which expands coverage of procurement.
  • FIDIC Conditions of Contract, 2017 edition, Sub-Clause 10.1.

Read the sources

  • ISO 55001:2024, asset management system requirements2024 edition; read 2026-09-26.ISO’s product page: the publication details and ISO’s own summary of the standard, not the requirement text. The contents, foreword and introduction cited in this publication are taken from the standard’s preview pages hosted on the ANSI webstore, not from this page.

In the asset lifecycle method

The steps of the two methods that this domain examines.

Related writing