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.'"

Comments

Use strategic open sourcing

[pieterh]

The key problem is (apart from the fact that inviting a large consultancy firm into your organisation is like inviting Tom Cruise into your marriage) that closed applications depend on a small skill pool that can be easily turned against you.

For many larger organisations, a straight-forward way to create a competitive market for services is to either open-source major systems, use existing open source applications (which is still difficult), or mandate that any new custom software must be open sourced.

For government departments, especially, this policy would improve quality and cut costs significantly, simply because anyone wishing to offer their skills would have access to the information they need.

Re:Use strategic open sourcing

[arivanov]

This is not necessary. In fact it is not enough. Both open source and close source applications can be a quagmire where developers simply go and get lost for ages. In fact making the application open source does nothing and proves nothing as far as long term maintainability. Similarly, an open source application can store its data in an absolutely nightmarish format understandable only to itself.

What matters is splitting projects and applications into small understandable modules which well defined and well documented API and make them operate on well defined data flows which are as open and easy to understand as possible.

From there on a module can be thrown out, replaced and modified at will at any particular moment with minimal fuss. Similarly, any vendor which has become too pushy can be shown the door and replaced with an alternative one.

Further onto this the first person to manage "easy" object persistence (like the Open Source Prevayler) should be quartered, skinned, boiled and the remains hanged at down. It is essential for the long term health of a module for it to store the data in a format that is understandable and accessible by third parties and not just itself. Prevayler (and the similar commercial frameworks) break this to bits. In fact it is possibly the best example for an Open Source lock-in tool I can think of.

Like most things, incompetence is to blame.

[mgblst]

The print version: http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R =printThis&A=/article/06/08/28/35FEservices_1.html

This comes through incompetence - it is too easy to hire outside help, and not setup an exit strategy (you listening, bush and blair?), when you don't understand the problem and won't ask for help. It is easier to get outside help than realise what you will need in the long term, and start hiring people. Oh, but when you need a new secretary, that gets done within the week.

Too many non-IT (and I am sure this happens in other departments) people are put in to manage IT infrastructure, and because they have in the past, feel the need to be making the important decisions. This is what happens.

And hire someone like IBM, and you will never get rid of them.

If people could do it themselves, they would

[petes_PoV]

Of the article's 12 steps, 2 are the reasons you got the SPs in, in the first place.

Step 5. Seek out expertise. Yes, that's a good reason to bring in external people. You don't have the skills in house and it's not cost/time effective to hire or train your own staff.

Step 8. Hire knowledge you need. Sounds pretty much like step 5 to me.

As for step 12: Give yourself over to a higher power -- your employees.

So, who's going to do their jobs while they "work side by side with the consultants"? Oh, I know. let's get more consultants in.

This article looks like it was written by the very people you're trying to get rid of. They can give you pretty prsentations and high-level bullet points. However, when you look under the covers at the substance. it all disappears.

Use consultants when you have an extraordinary need, if you really have to.

Better to have them do the mundane stuff, and train you own people to do the cutting edge, interesting, high-value work....... Assuming they're good enough.

Re:If people could do it themselves, they would

[Anonymous Coward]

As a consultant, I see it all the time - companies have a really poor opinion of their employees and a slick consulting firm can easily appear to be attractive (regardless of their competence). So organisations really need to understand what consultants can do for them and why they cannot do it in house. A good consulting firm and service provider is worth their expertise and experience.

In general organisations that have trouble getting rid of consultants are really really bad.
I have been working on a six month project for two years now and we (as the consultants) are trying to find an acceptable exit strategy for ourselves. But due to staff turnover and limitations of our scope to design (XP/Win2003 infrastructure implementation) work only , we cannot get them over the edge in terms of operations procedures so that they can run with the deployment to 1000 sites.

It is frustrating because we know we don't need to be there and we are losing good personnel because they are not being challenged as they continually need to hand hold the existing and new company staff.

Understand why

[James Youngman]

Interestingly the article doesn't point out to the reader that they also need to pay attention to the reasons why the service provider got called in in the first place, any why they needed to stay so long. There's an underlying issue there (be it manpower, organisational ability, wrong executive sponsorship of projects, skills, poor control of scope creep, etc.) The underlying issue needs to be addressed or you will be back in the same situation before you know it.

Re:Understand why

[petes_PoV]

I was told the company had spent thousands on the consultant and for that reason would be going ahead with his suggestions.

This is one of the most common reasons I have heard for going ahead with a consultants recommendations. "if we don't, the money's been wasted".

Never mind that the consultant cost (maybe) 5 grand, and the recommendations cost five hundred to implement. One of the perverse outcomes is that the more your consultant charges, the more likely their recommendations are to be accepted.

Worse, as the costs go up the harder it becomes to say "hang on, this project's not delivering the benefits". There's so much investment, that it becomes politically impossible to lose face and cancel it. In the end, the money runs out. The consultants leave. Everyone agrees that the project was a success.

If ever there was a need for "the emperors new clothes", the IT industry is it.

From the consultant's side of things

[bhmit1]

I am one of those hated consultants, and I see things pan out three different ways:

1. Never ending project. This one usually seems pretty straight forward and then management keeps extending. When those extensions are because they see the value of me doing more, that's fine. But more often than not, it's because they can't get their own staff to pick up the new challenge. Typically that's a result of under staffing.

2. Scope creep. Essentially I'm brought in for something small, and groups are constantly adding on more tasks. When this is combined with the "never ending project" above, I basically become entrenched. I don't mind if it's interesting work, but all too often, after the first few months, I'm doing things that won't apply to any other customer and have stop growing. When I'm on a project like this for 3 times the original duration, I tend to get antsy and weight the cost to the relationship of not signing the next contract to extend. If the work stays interesting, I'm happy to be paid consulting rates for full time employment.

3. The right way. Not many people successfully do this. The thing these customers have had in common is that the staff wasn't overworked and were truly interesting in learning what I was doing and taking over. Also, the work I'm doing typically involves drawing from experience at my previous clients and vendor training. Any extensions are usually to do something above and beyond the original contract, and not to maintain what I've developed.

It's not a bad thing to be at a customer forever if you are always doing something new and doing it faster and therefore cheaper than their internal staff could have done. It's bad when they keep you there to maintain their environment, and it's bad for both the customer and for the consultant, the good consultants at least.

Re:Service Provider Addiction?

[m0nstr42]

That was, like, the point and stuff. All in good fun.