A Consultant's View
Prairie Trail Software, Inc. ............................................................. April 2005
A sensible idea becomes a management fad when it becomes the answer to any and all problems. Outsourcing–a valid tool–has become a management fad. Results are starting to come in from the last few years’ outsourcing. They are not pretty.
Young Indian professionals who thought that customer support for American companies would be a good career are facing hostile phone calls, and stress levels which they never imagined a few years ago. Customers are screaming at them.
Story after story is leaking out. One Silicon Valley firm moved all its development to India only to have to pull much of it back, because the work done just wasn’t what their customers had been asking for. A New England company tried outsourcing, only to find that they needed a lot of people over here to manage the work over there. An airline switched eighty percent of its work to India, but is now facing a quality problem.
Even the Indian companies who are trying to get your business are starting to raise voices of concern over what is being sent to them. Here is what one’s web page says, “Perhaps the biggest problem with out-sourcing…to India is the lack of deep understanding of the local market…This will need to be done by companies who are very close to the market.”
Another Indian company lists types of software development projects not to send to them: anything with proprietary knowledge, very technical and complex projects, and the very small projects.
CFO Magazine recently pointed to two problems with outsourcing: companies often sign up without enough preparation, and managers are outsourcing for the wrong reasons.
Outsourcing to any company, Indian or local, brings on communications issues. You can’t walk down the hall to talk to the the developers. Sending a project to India means that the project has to be defined well enough that someone halfway around the world, and from a different culture, can comprehend that which is being asked of them. That takes a lot more management time and effort.
Many times, the people doing the work in India are young recent graduates, who grew up in a different culture. While such programmers are graduating at high numbers each year, India has a shortage of experienced project managers. That means that when a project is not well defined and well managed, things go wrong. The culture for handling bugs, mistakes, and schedule slippages is very different.
Many projects need only a week or two of work. Remember when you could walk over to the developers and talk it over with them–and they could do it? Write a strict specification for that? Work up the test criteria? These projects are not cost effective to send overseas.
It is far more cost effective to use someone locally when the project is small. Then, the person can actually come in and see what the operating environment will be like, and do their own gathering of the requirements.
It is important to know when a project will be cost effective to send overseas. It is also important to know when people are needed here to talk face to face to the actual users to find out what they really need. Balancing that is the challenge of IT management.
What are your goals in life? Many a sales person wants only to have a specific amount of money. Often, they subscribe to the philosophy: the person with the most toys at the end–wins.
Herb Kelleher, Executive Chairman of Southwest Airlines, gave a different set of goals in a speech at SMU, “You must set your goals as achievement and excellence– for your self-satisfaction…Money and happiness are byproducts only.”
Those are tough goals to apply to the real life. In order to do it, we need to ask ourselves, “For which areas of life do I have the passion and commitment to fight for my goals? What constitutes true excellence and in what areas will I strive for it?”
It really helps to ask what I want out of life. Too often, we start off by adopting other people’s ideas of what we should do; however, to achieve true greatness, each person has to have a deeper connection with his or her own ideals.
Happiness is not a true goal. Even in the most American of documents, the Declaration of Independence, it is the “pursuit of happiness” that is promoted, not happiness itself.
Only on the journey do we learn that happiness is found in the seeking not the achieving. So, what are your goals?
Age Scanners? Many a bar has purchased the software to scan IDs to verify the age of their clientele. These work well with the casual underage person. But bartender Mike Pritchard reports that there are many fake IDŐs out there that scan just fine. They can even have correct bar code data. These age verification machines can be fooled if you want to spend enough. Prices start at $48 on the internet.
(He also reports that he has called the cops on ID's he thought were fake yet scanned ok. The results were that the kids got busted for having a fake ID.)
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Dave Randolph,
President, Prairie Trail Software