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Shark Tank: Hey, straight down is a direction too
51 comments- IT TOPICS:Careers, Development, Management, Personal Technology
This big company announces a dramatic new direction: It will reduce its workforce by 6,000 worldwide to free up $100 million to feed product development, reports a pilot fish among the 6,000.
"After 18 months of research, senior management outsourced such 'business support' functions as IT, finance, purchasing, HR, engineering and accounts payable," fish says.
"The IT department was outsourced to two separate companies: one for the infrastructure and one for the business applications."
Trouble is, the company that lands the infrastructure contract has never done this sort of work before -- just call centers and application support.
Worse still, even though existing IT staffers are transferred to the outsourcer, it's a skeleton crew. More than 150 staffers have jumped ship in the months before the outsourcing contract was announced. "We had a standing monthly party to say goodbye to our colleagues at a local watering hole," says fish.
And the bleeding continues once the transfers start, with the expected chaos, higher workloads and competing goals for each team.
And then there's the staff brought in from the outsourcing company. "They sent in their best, most experienced people -- average age 24," sighs fish. "On some teams, they are replacing a staff with an average level of experience that is greater than the average age of the replacement staff.
"The IT staff of our company has been very professional and has tried diligently to teach both the way our company does the work and the details of the technologies themselves to the new staff. But after five months, it became clear to the CIO that the outsourcing company cannot handle anything that requires in-depth understanding or creative usage of the technology.
"In five years, they will have six years of experience."
Result: Management scrambles to implement a "recovery project" to determine what new IT positions must be created, and to find qualified people to fill them.
But that's complicated by the fact that hundreds of staffers were laid off when they were "replaced" -- and still more are scheduled to be dumped by the end of the fiscal year.
"They're now trying to give individual employees an extension on their employment so they are still here when they complete the recovery project," fish says.
"Last week, I heard one of the people working on the recovery project say he thought he could rehire those who left voluntarily to fill the new positions. I wonder if the people he's talking about would look at it that way."
Outsource the telling of your true tale of IT life to Sharky at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a Shark shirt, not a pink slip, if I use it.
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