Bottom-up outsourcing
I happened upon this little tidbit on my blog backlog. The unconventional James Governor taking a whack at outsourcing as done from the trenches: James Governor’s Monkchips » Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget
Some of my past compatriots may recall the idea I had worked up that didn’t go quite this grass roots, but was a variation on a theme that might appeal to the slightly more conservative innovators.
The suggestion was that the projects be done to understand an explore outsourcing for the company, and learn to manage and use it down in the people that would be the internal leads. The developers would examine the train of tasks coming through, and the projects they had assigned or that were of value to them (which may be their own projects). They would then propose how to outsource, under their direction and management, a project or component. The collection of these proposals would be collected periodically (or continuously) and assessed for value, risk, and other criteria the company and team may see fit. At that point, the selection would whittle it down to a few and distribute the budget accordingly in the proposals (with possibly a round of refinement if the numbers don’t all add up) and the developers would have both skin in the game, and would stand to gain both valuable management and communication skills and experience, but also would show some of the soft-skill capabilities to the company.
Unfortunately, the corporate and technical leadership at the time figured that big projects and minimal oversight was the way to go, so not only did the staff gain near-zero experience in this global toolset, but the outsourcing also had a number of large failures, little learning, and didn’t bring value to the company in any reasonable time frame. Lessons have been learned since, but I still stand by this approach if you want your team to think of outsourcing as a partnering and supplier-style tool, they need to be involved and committed.
If you’re faced with the opportunity or need, consider a variety of approaches, and also consider strategically how you expect outsourcing to work in your company on a continuing basis, what you need to make that happen as far as your staff skills, and finally what it will take to make that transition start. Delegating into the team the responsibility and control serves a number of needs and strategic goals if you’re serious about adding outsourcing to your tool aresenal.
Currently playing in iTunes: Comfort by Jillian Ann
June 25th, 2008 at 12:59 am
hey that really was backlog!
I like your idea- it seems to me you’re basically talking about alignment through participation. Top down alone doesn’t really gives the makers and doers enough purpose to really make outsourcing work. The approach you lay out here on the other hand involves bottom up as well as top down, and is therefore more likely to engage those involved. Problem is organisations don’t generally get this granular - they just want a large transaction to deliver a project or take a problem off their hands.
FYI- i couldn’t submit a comment using Firefox3. I had to use IE instead?
June 25th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I think the idea of participation both directions hits on the core of the matter, and it is all too disappointingly true that the “make a difference” or “big bang” syndrome strikes executives to effect immediate change rather than effective or lasting change.
On Firefox:
It seems the hotspot for the button in firefox 3 isn’t actually the whole button. On Mac OS X, it seems to be more the right side of the button… I daresay it may not even be aligned on other OS combos. I’ll dig through the theme to see if there’s something bizarre about the layout which I’ve admittedly also edited.
update:
It’s definitely the theme. I’ve defaulted back to the wordpress default classic and the button is correct…..
update 2:
I had altered a few margins in the content and header, and the result mangled the CSS footer to overlap and actually “cover” the left side of the button, which depending on settings, font sizes et al in the browser, made the button essentially unclickable as the footer would intercept as target. I believe it’s fixed now. Thanks James for pointing that one out!