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Not sure if this applies to edu, but here's the way it normally seems to work in corporate: Aspiring manager decides to hitch his or her wagon to offshoring IT

by ethbro 10y ago

Not sure if this applies to edu, but here's the way it normally seems to work in corporate: Aspiring manager decides to hitch his or her wagon to offshoring IT initiative. Manager hires consulting firm to handle details / take fall if it goes poorly. Switch-over normally goes well. Cost savings are demonstrated in year 1. Manager gets promotion / bonus because of fine job he or she did. Consulting firm gets paid because they delivered. Offshore IT appears to be working well. In year 2, company finds out there's an extremely frequent business interaction with IT that wasn't covered by the contract (because management lives in a land of abstracted rather than actual business processes). Offshore IT bills them an arm and a leg for it. Repeat this for every change request. Service also seems to degrade as new faces are substituted in on the offshore side (B team for A team). In year 3, company needs to migrate to a new business system. Offshore IT (under current contract) is revealed as utterly incompetent for something this complex. Offshore IT will happily sign a new contract to make it happen, if company is willing to pay more. In year 4, company is still attempting the migration. After signing the migration contract, offshore assigned more competent resources. However, it is revealed there is now no one left at the company with deep expertise in the system (the person who worked on it for 20 years was let go during the offshoring) to interface with offshore IT experts. And of course nothing was documented. In year 5, the migration is still ostensibly underway but has generally been accepted as failing. The offshore IT initiative is now regarded as a more expensive boondoggle that delivered worse service. The manager moved on somewhere around year 3.5, securing a better position based on his or her track record with successful IT offshoring. Which they are then asked to do for their new employer. The consultants are also in strong demand, based on their track record of successful IT offshoring initiatives. Any problems that occured when they were no longer involved obviously can't be attributed to them. Tl;dr - pump and dump with a department of employees and people's lives

zerkten 10y ago
This is so very true based on my experiences with pharma. The only addition I'd make in year 1 is that most of the company is told that everything will be business as usual. It's not "BAU" because the Offshore IT team brings new processes and there is often a cultural mismatch. The business teams then decide to be uncooperative and work as much as possible outside the bounds of IT for the next 4 years. This makes the environment even more poisonous for all involved.
marktangotango 10y ago
> However, it is revealed there is now no one left at the company with deep expertise in the system (the person who worked on it for 20 years was let go during the offshoring) to interface with offshore IT experts. And of course nothing was documented. I've lived this a couple of times. If given time, the newbs can usually figure it all out, on the companies time (and $$$), and at the expense of forward momentum in the market and customer good will. Oh that IE6 client? Yeah that REALLY has to change now. But these costs are hard/impossible to quantify, and who wants to pay these high priced developers anyway?
robjan 10y ago
I have this exact experience with offshoring in my company. The management became convinced that more people = faster/better and that quality of resourcing wasn't a thing. So we now have to manage about 20x the number of people, and the people change every day. We strongly suspect that we are being used to train these offshore people because as soon as they start delivering reasonable quality things, they move off the project and get replaced with a new incompetent person. We are left with two options: let the project fail due to incompetent resources and take the fall as the only remaining in-house IT staff; or waste time training the resources and proving that the offshore model works.

by ethbro 10y ago

zerkten 10y ago

This is so very true based on my experiences with pharma. The only addition I'd make in year 1 is that most of the company is told that everything will be business as usual. It's not "BAU" because the Offshore IT team brings new processes and there is often a cultural mismatch. The business teams then decide to be uncooperative and work as much as possible outside the bounds of IT for the next 4 years. This makes the environment even more poisonous for all involved.

marktangotango 10y ago

> However, it is revealed there is now no one left at the company with deep expertise in the system (the person who worked on it for 20 years was let go during the offshoring) to interface with offshore IT experts. And of course nothing was documented. I've lived this a couple of times. If given time, the newbs can usually figure it all out, on the companies time (and $$$), and at the expense of forward momentum in the market and customer good will. Oh that IE6 client? Yeah that REALLY has to change now. But these costs are hard/impossible to quantify, and who wants to pay these high priced developers anyway?

robjan 10y ago

I have this exact experience with offshoring in my company. The management became convinced that more people = faster/better and that quality of resourcing wasn't a thing. So we now have to manage about 20x the number of people, and the people change every day. We strongly suspect that we are being used to train these offshore people because as soon as they start delivering reasonable quality things, they move off the project and get replaced with a new incompetent person. We are left with two options: let the project fail due to incompetent resources and take the fall as the only remaining in-house IT staff; or waste time training the resources and proving that the offshore model works.