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12 Steps to Beat Your Service-Provider Addiction
eastbayted writes "It starts off simply enough: Your company signs on an outside firm to help you finish an important app dev project on deadline. But then they convince you they can be of service in getting other work done at your company, and you agree. Before you know it, your organization has become far too dependent on this team of outsiders on whom you're wasting a ton of money and perhaps not getting much in the way of a return. InfoWorld has devised a 12-step program 'that can help wean you off unhealthy dependencies on service providers, consultants, and outsourcers — without having to check into the Betty Ford Clinic or make a tearful confession on Oprah.'"
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R =printThis&A=/article/06/08/28/35FEservices_1.html
This is spot on correct. There have been far too many occasions where companies get so rushed to deliver they bring in outside help but do not bother getting full documentation sorted out as they did not have enough manpower to begin with, and they then move the outside help on to other projects without getting the sufficient docmentation written, potentially leaving the system in a state which is unknown to the actual employees and will require more input from the outside help if modification is required in the future.
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For what I've observed, high management just doesn't see any underlying issue. I once have prooved to my old manager that it would be much cheaper and less riksy for the company to hire permanent employees and pay them fairly than keep spending tons of money on consulting and outsourcing for long periods of times. He replied that new employees would be seen as an increase in headcount (and consequently in expenses) as opposed to hiring a consulting firm, which is considered an investment. In other words, it would look good in the balance sheet for the stackeholders, even though the company would be losing more money.
As long stakeholders are happy and high management is getting their bonuses, there's no issue at all.
Try consulting with the Government.
They are under pressure to cut staff and currently most non-DOD (in the US) organizations are feeling a serious crunch. Once they hire someone, it is near to impossible to fire them, hence they acrue a large amount of dead wood. Their hiring process takes months and sometimes years. This is compounded by budget cycles, hiring restrictions, quotas, background checks, and clearances.
For many of these organizations, it is MUCH easier and faster to get a "beltway bandit" to fill in and actually do the work. Some organizations are mainly management staff running pools of contractors (for example NASA). Is this the best use of Tax Payer Money?
Note, I are one of dem contractors.
I'm also one such. We've been darned lucky, it seems, as we've not had this sort of problem, or not much. Our longest running customer for whom we developed quite a number of products allowed us to train and affect hiring practice, in effect making us unnecessary, but still desirable == we still get calls for fiddly maintenance jobs to customize this or that for some big customer of his. Having written the code in question, we can just do it cleaner and faster than his guys, even with the training. Other customers (and some of the names would surprise you) just took the design and said "thanks, see ya" and that was that -- they needed no more. Maybe our worst customer (a nice people, however) had a government grant to develop something he had no clue about, so hired us. We thought the thing was a good thing, so we took the job. It was a visio tactile aid for deaf infants. But the customer gave us NO feedback, it seemed everything we did was perfect (even though we knew better). It might sound heavenly to get nothing but unspecific praise, but we wanted more help on specs than we got. He was just burning the grant money and taking a cut, so the more he spent on us, the bigger his cut was. When the grant ran out, he of course dumped us, not saving enough to put this nice thing into anyone's actual hands though we built circa 30 prototypes for him. BTW my consulting firm never does fixed price or contract work, period. If you can't trust the guy, what good is a contract? No fixed price job is ever bid accurately, so someone is getting ripped, and we don't want the karma from that either way. And there ARE legitimate spec changes once a project becomes better understood. That long running customer had all his engineers in complete fear, as he would let them almost finish a job, then come in and stir the pot, forcing a redesign. Dumb like a fox, this guy, as we all know Rev2 of anything is the first good one. We only work directly for CEOs and owners, maybe down the line some chief of engineering handles the day to day communications and spec writing. That way there's no doubt when it comes to check writing and so on, no BS, or what the real vision for a product was. We've also gotten praise for showing someone a product they had in mind was a waste of time, and getting it cancelled. There's always something else to do, so this is no biggie. Often the worker bees at the place are afraid to do things like this, but we get to point out stupid stuff without getting fired. Saving a customer a few million dollars on something bound to fail is considered a favor by anyone we'd want to work with anyway.