All Posts in Outsourcing

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A ManagementSpeak from 2008: “This is an opportunity to expand your value to the organization and build your career.” The translation: Budget cuts prevent us from hiring the people we need, so we’re increasing your responsibilities and workload (and thanks to Peter Bushman for spotting and translating it).

In 2008, and for who knows how long before that, the promise of career advancement … the promise, not the delivery … has been enough to encourage initiative and hard work delivered in unpaid overtime, donated by career-minded employees in the expectation that the promise will be fulfilled.

Making the promise has no budget impact, a fact many managers take advantage of. And as the actual promotion depends on a more senior or management position being open, failing to fulfill the promise is never the promiser’s fault.

Smart leaders do their best to deliver on the promise, and not make promises they can’t keep. They’re smart, that is, if initiative comes in the form of useful ideas and the hard work and unpaid overtime are executed well.

The career-advancement promise is, that is, contingent on the delivery of high-value results. If ideas are foolish and work is of poor quality? That’s a case of more not always being better, and ought to result in a candid conversation. Employees deserve an explanation of how and why their results don’t qualify.

No fraud, no harm, no foul. It’s a formula that can work well for all parties.

But imagine the workplace evolves as suggested in this space last week, with employees eschewing traditional forms of career advancement. It might be wanting just a job and not a career. It might be a more radical shift away from employment altogether, as people figure out how to piece together a rewarding life and the wherewithal to live it by contracting, by driving for Lyft and Uber, and otherwise signing up for the “gig economy.”

Whatever it is, an unfortunate consequence (for management) is less reason for employees to show initiative, let alone to donate unpaid hours to the CEO’s retirement fund. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” is more likely to dominate employee culture than “We give it 110 percent.”

On the other side of the coin, if fewer employees have career aspirations that means, if we’re going to be cynical about it, that managers have more opportunities to dangle in front of the remaining employees who still do. It’s simple math: fewer employees will be competing for roughly the same number of career-advancing positions, so their odds improve.

But what if you’re in the workforce and don’t want the Hobson’s Choice of either climbing the career ladder at the expense of living the life you want, or living the life you want without the sense of personal achievement that has, in the past come from career advancement?

Right now the best you can probably do is sign up with one or more IT services firms that specialize in providing contract talent to their clients. As you succeed in your assignments your billing rate will track your level of accomplishment, as will the title next to your name: The Role you’re sold as being competent in, prefixed by nothing, “Senior,” or “Master.” Along with the prefix comes increasing difficulty and level of interest in the assignments you take on.

Bob’s last word: We are, I think, in the middle of a major transition in how businesses and the workforce relate to each other. The current state of this transition is what we’ve been exploring last week and here.

But we shouldn’t confuse the current state with the end point. If current trends continue, my own forecast is that this will all evolve into the reincarnation of the guild.

A guild, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a membership-based home for practitioners of a trade. It has some characteristics of a union, others of credentialing bodies, along with the role services firms now play in finding work for the professionals they represent.

Companies needing staff with a particular set of skills would no longer go through the dysfunctional recruiting process they and the targets of their potential affection are currently afflicted with. Instead they’d contact the relevant guild, which would be responsible for providing appropriately skilled workers, invoicing for their services, and paying the workers for their time and effort.

This doesn’t mean “employment” would be entirely a relic of a quaint and rosy past. I do think we’ll see a significant shift in this direction.

Bob’s sales pitch: CIO.com has published the second of three articles on Technical Architecture in my IT 101 series. You’ll find it here: “Evaluating technical architecture: 11 key criteria and how to apply them.” If you need to catch up, you’ll find the first technical architecture article in the series here: “Technical architecture: What IT does for a living.”

Comments

|In: Outsourcing|Last Updated:

Principle #1 of the KJR Manifesto: There are no best practices, only practices that fit best.

Principle #2 of the KJR Manifesto: To optimize the whole you must suboptimize the parts.

Which gets us back to outsourcing – when it makes sense and when it doesn’t once you peel the onion beyond the usual, shallow rationales.

Last week we explored the practical matter of whether a company’s executives might be better or worse at hiring and managing a given business function’s leadership … and leaving it to that leadership to make that function effective … than they would be at selecting, negotiating a contract with, and managing an outsourcer to make that function effective.

Because really, when deciding whether to outsource or insource, isn’t that the only question that matters?

What’s left to be said on the subject? The first two principles of the KJR Manifesto, that’s what.

Why? Because the usual arguments in favor of outsourcing talk about how it lets executive leadership focus on what’s “core” to the business. Because of Principle #2, core-ness, is, as it turns out, a double-edged sword.

That’s because the concept of “core” is pretty much synonymous with the concept of strategic focus, just as strategic focus is, or at least should be, pretty much synonymous with a company’s unique selling proposition – its competitive differentiation.

Which means it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for: another look at KJR’s favorite stalking horse – the pre-2008 General Motors, and how it was a train wreck that happened at three miles per hour over a span of twenty years.

What GM should have been focused on, and what would have prevented its derailment, was selling cars people want to buy, not on bribing customers with rebates in order to sell more financing contracts.

But even with a relentless focus on selling cars people want to buy, that leaves open the question of what leads potential customers to decide to buy a car at all, and what it is that leads them to choose one make and model over another.

You know what’s coming: Different car buyers care about different car attributes. Some care more about flashy styling, others about reliability, or fuel economy, or driveability, or pick your characteristics.

Which gets us to Principle #1, which in the end means whatever you want to optimize for will lead to trade-offs in everything else you might want to optimize for.

If, for example, you want to design a car for engine power and lots of it, the space you’ll need under the hood to mount a bigger engine constrains your ability to design a car that looks sleek and streamlined.

And vice versa. Additional trade-off examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

What does this have to do with the subject? If you’re on the board of a car company that’s supposed to sell cars people want to buy, and you understand what leads car buyers to choose one car over another, you’ll put a CEO in place who understands which of a car’s many characteristics the company has to be phenomenal at: Styling, engines, quality of construction, and so on. Whatever the competitive differentiators, they are the core –the buttons and levers the business can push and pull to sell more cars and sell them profitably.

They must be insourced.

Does this mean everything else can be outsourced? Yes it does, emphasis on “can.” “Should” is a different question entirely.

Bob’s last word: When looking at outsourcers, remember they have their own competitive differentiators – characteristics they optimize for. They’ll call them “best practices.” As you decide whether to outsource, and if so with whom, pay close attention to Principle #1. Because what you want aren’t best practices. You want practices that are best for you, which can be a different proposition entirely.

Bob’s sales pitch: No, I didn’t write this week’s column to sell more copies of the KJR Manifesto (full title: Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology). But if you haven’t read it, you should. As one reviewer put it:

This should be required reading for all Boards of Directors and all Government leaders (MPs, Congressmen, Senators etc.) plus all of us in middle (and junior) management.Oh, and it is still a slim book which is almost impossible to put down! Amazing for a really great “management text”!

Comments