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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.'"
The reason they stay so long is often simply down to inertia. The "We've started so we'll finish." coupled nicely to the "Why did we pay them so much if we are not going to listen to them?".
I used to work for a company that was taken over by an asset stripping industrial conglomerate, to make sure they got the best return for their money they sent in consultants for every department. Sadly, in the engineering department we used lots of fancy computers running non-industry standard programs. So, when the consultant came to look he had no idea what the system actually was doing or what it was capable of. His recommendation was to shift to industry standards, including AutoCad, which the company did despite my best efforts. The company lost its competitive edge as soon as the standard software was put in. I had 2 of the existing suppliers (one the main application provider, the other the hardware/os support company) they both submitted very similar suggestions for the way forward. The application provider, obviously, had a vested interest. The support company had no vested interest as they expected to continue to provide support regardless of the direction chosen.
I presented my own findings and pointed out several flaws in the consultants report, I also presented the reports from the 2 other companies. The only thing I was asked about the reports was who had authorised the spend on the additional reports and when I said they had been provided for no charge, I was told the company had spent thousands on the consultant and for that reason would be going ahead with his suggestions. I resigned at that point.
In case you are interested, the consultants suggestions were implimented in full at great cost and since the old systems were decommissioned the productivity of the company has dropped, which has had the obvious outcome of reducing it in size to about 10% the size it was when I left.
On a plus note, the consultant made me move into a much more enjoyable and profitable job.
Many companies get outsourcing wrong, particularly in IT, because they have have managers who don't know how things work, they've never written a line of code or put in a server in their lives and don't seem to have a learning gene inside them. I work in a company who has a contract with a financial company for a major system, and honestly, I think we're the only ones who care sometimes. Of course we're the only ones who knows how the app works. We're certainly the only ones who seems to know what's going on, and if something happens even remotely related in the general area of our system we have all sorts of people in the company instantly hanging on to our apron strings and phoning us up. I suppose it's because many boring companies, like financial ones, just can't attract the right people who can think for themselves - hence they become even more dependant on outsourcers and consultants than they otherwise would be. When you see how many of these companies operate, you can see why.
;-).
This part of the article I always worry about:
You must roll out a major enterprise app on a tight deadline and you don't have the bodies to pull it off. So you borrow some money from next year's budget and hire a global services firm to help.
This never works - ever. Managers of IT projects who don't know much about IT seem to have this incredibly bizarre idea that IT people, programmers and analysts are all interchangeable. You can drop someone from a project two months away from the deadline, bring someone else in who knows nothing about what's going on and the new person will instantly hit the ground running. They also do it again, and again, and again and again. They also equate getting bodies on the project directly with getting it done faster. If something is late and obviously a complete mess it instantly becomes a resource problem. Not that I like calling 'people' 'resources'.
I've seen it time and again. Company gets an outsourcing company and consultants in to develop a system because they don't have the people or the expertise. Said company has no real idea what the requirements are in terms that they can get over to the consultants, they have no real idea exactly what they want these consultants to do and the whole thing becomes a mess with the outsourcing company, quite rightly, creaming off whatever money they can because of the ignorance and lack of clarity from the main company. The company then starts to bitch and whine about the 'leech' outsourcer and the relationship deteriorates. Rinse and repeat the process for the next outsourcing company.
The article can be summed up thus. Fire the useless people in your company and employ good people who can define requirements well, and consequently, can lay it on the line to outside consultants exactly what they want. The consultants will then actually be much happier, because they will know what it is they've got to do - something they probably haven't had much of