Slashdot Mirror
How Many People Work in Your Internet Department?
WorkinTooHard asks: "Two years ago, I took the job of Internet Marketing Manager for a international company, with a crazy idea that I could convince senior management that the internet wasn't a fad. The only problem was that I didn't expect a (respected) mid-level manager to be the road block. We are in the middle of a major website redesign (the current site has not been updated in over 8 years) and everyone is asking why it takes so long to complete, and almost daily I have to explain that I do not have enough manpower. Of course, I can't prove ROI until the new site is launched (a great Catch22). How many people do you have working in/on your company's Internet/Intranet and Extranet sites and applications? How many full-time web-application developers, content providers, analytics people, UI designers, email marketing people, and so forth?"
"Please note that this includes anyone who works directly in building and maintaining your companies current website, electronic marketing and Internet applications. If you can, include the size of your company, number of employess, the number of active products being sold/supported, and how much outsourcing you do? The company I am currently working for has over 13,000 active products and over 30,000 products which need to be supported. We do no outsourcing, have over 900 employess in North America (over 8000 worldwide) and a total of 2 full time web developers, 1 part time developer/SQL guru and 1 content/data person as well as two people in our MarCom office which periodically write copy."
Maybe it is time to give them a demo. Not necessarily a functioning demo, mock-up screens will do. You'll give them an idea of what exactly you're trying to do and if they think you're on the right track you'll get more funding for new hires.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Here are some handy things to phrase more politely than I'm phrasing them here:
"I can't tell you when it will be finished until we know exactly what we're building. Help us nail down the specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
"There is a finite amount of manpower available to do this work, and the schedule I gave you is firm, unless we either add people -- and that won't be a one-to-one improvement, it will depend on how much work can be run in parallel -- or reduce scope. Help us do that, and I'll be able to get you a new completion date."
"I know you want these changes in the initial launch, and I want to give you these changes in the initial launch. However, there will be some impact to how long it will take, because a lot of work we've already completed will need to be redone. Help us nail down the new specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
Repeat ad nauseum until the project is finished.
Because that's not how big corps work. They are much more likely to spend $x to hire an outside firm or consultants than the same $x to staff up.
.jonah's voice from the trenches for today.
Two cases in point:
1) My company (3 people) was hired to redesign the corporate website (twice) and build the entire employee intranet for a $300m/7,000 employee company. This client had a 60+ person web team in the corporate division alone, yet had to hire out to a tiny team of crack individuals to actually get anything done.
2) I'm working with another client now - smaller but much older - that would much rather have us (as the consulting firm) hire and manage the people we need for the project and pass the cost on to them (plus a markup) than hire internally.
I don't understand the accounting side enough to know what the benefits are there, but from a management perspective, it's very nice to be able to make a single "entity" responsible for the project (as kind of a black box) than to have to think about and deal with an internal "team".
Thank you for listening to
I don't understand the accounting side enough to know what the benefits are there
They're called "recurring costs", and hiring outside consultants don't generate them while hiring employees do. Let's say you have to accomplish some project, and it's going to require roughly 1600 man hours to complete (three programmers working for three months, eight hour days). You don't have three programmers with enough time to dedicate to this project. So, you have two choices:
a) hire three guys
b) hire an outside firm to do the work
Finding and hiring three qualified programmers is going to take longer than finding one qualified firm, but even if it wasn't it's still cheaper to go with route b in this instance. Three programmers are going to cost you about $250,000 a year, give or take $50,000 depending on your market. So even if you spend $100 per hour on the outside firm, you're coming out ahead at only $160,000. Not to mention, once this project is done, if you go with route a, you're now stuck with three more employees, for whom you have to find something to do or else they're just going to get disgruntled and spend all day posting on Slashdot.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
A county spent 6 months with a staff of four programmers to build their site with the newer version of this software. I was asked to do it in 3 months by myself...It's a month past deadline and if I don't finish it by the end of next week, I'm fired.
I call bullshit. It's incredibly difficult to fire state employees, and given that there's documented evidence of a similar organization taking 8 times the resources to complete the same project, there's no way you can get fired for this from a large corporation, let alone the state.
If your manager has literally threatened you with termination over this, stop working on the project and go directly to your HR department, do not pass GO. Tell them about your stress (it helps if you have a doctor's note or, even better, a note from Epstein's muttah, stating that you're under immense stress and borderline to a breakdown) and make sure they know you've been threatened with termination for not doing what four people couldn't. You'll be surprised at how fast they move to make sure you're taken care of.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.