The outsourcing mess
The outsourcing company we worked for had bid and been awarded the contract to take care of the IT for a large fortune 500 company. It is a company that you know but the name is not important. I will call it xx company. Our outsourcing company had bid the contract extremely cheap and planned on moving every IT job to India to save money. Company xx had union IT employees and due to union rules the training period for the people in India would be short and then all the employees in the U.S. would be let go. In most other outsourcing I have been involved in the transition is more of a gradual process.
There were many IT groups to transition to the offshore team. The Production Control/automation team was only one of them. I don't think our company really understood what the Production Control/automation group controlled and how critical it was to the company. At this point I wasn't involved in any of this. The first few of months the xx staff members were supposed to be sharing information with the offshore people and the 4th month it was supposed to be only the offshore team doing all the work with the xx staff completely hands off. Then almost every one of the xx companies IT staff would be let go. But in reality it didn't go like that.
Of course the xx company staff were unhappy about losing their jobs. They weren't very forthcoming with information to the offshore team. Even in the 4th/final month the xx employees were still doing most of the work. To make things worse, our company did not find competent employees with mainframe knowledge in India. At this point in the outsourcing world mainframe knowledge was scarce in India. It is not taught in India colleges, same as it is not taught in American colleges.
In the first month of the contract after the xx employees were laid off things did not go well. The offshore Production Control team messed up the first Payroll and more than 5,000 employees didn't get paid. It gets a lot of attention when everyone including the CEO does not get paid. Employees with automated withdrawals overdrew their accounts. It was a huge mess. Then it got worse. The offshore Production Control messed up the financials and xx company couldn't report their earnings to wall street. The first mistake only affected the company internally but the second one was very public. The third mistake significantly overpaid and significantly underpaid some external contractors and bills. This caused another very visible/messy problem. The final problem of the first month was that the employees didn't get paid ….. again. Including the CEO(again). It was at this point they reached out to my boss and asked if they could get some help. Mary and I were enlisted.
Mary and I didn't know that we were walking into a huge hornets nest. Our first day (dripping wet) we found that we had to figure out this companies processing. Immediately. This is a large task. All issues needed to be resolved immediately and of course the offshore team was less than helpful(useless) and the original employees were long gone. Our boss knew a few things and there were clues here and there. We struggled to make it through the first day.
Company xx's mainframe processing hadn't been updated over the years. They were stuck in the late 1980's. For example, I wondered why I had to keep plugging in dates everywhere. Sometimes today's date, sometimes yesterday's. Different date formats every time. It was a struggle. This is a computer. It knows today's date. Another example was where we needed to balance the financials. The task was to find the correct values from the reports and add and subtract them to make sure that the ins and outs balanced with what is in the accounts. Occasionally like in currency conversions there was even a multiplication. It was a long process with many numbers…..but the numbers were all available to the computer and adding, subtracting and multiplication are simple to a computer. However…. to make all this work would require a very significant number of hours to program. All of this should have been done by the application programming teams but at this point it was up to us to make our day to day jobs easier. During the day from 8 to 5 we did what was required for that night's processing. We would grab a quick dinner. Then we would write code late into the night and early morning. The client was very angry at first and getting anything from them was difficult. Slowly, over time, they realized that at least we knew what we were doing. For them that was at least an improvement over the offshore people. Over time the clients found that the two of us were able to function as well as the 7 or 8 previous employees….. They slowly started to warm up to us….We continued our late night programming. Sometimes working until 2am-3am in our Marriot rooms. Over the next few months, processing slowly got better and better. The client realized that things were running even better than before. We had automated many of the day to day simple tasks and removed the errors that had always popped up due to human error.
Our bosses also recognized that we had pulled the contract from the brink of failure to a success. We got some additional cash and one night one of the higher ups took the two of us out to a very nice restaurant. I spent the next year trying to replicate their thick cut pork chops.
It could never have been done without Mary.
There were many IT groups to transition to the offshore team. The Production Control/automation team was only one of them. I don't think our company really understood what the Production Control/automation group controlled and how critical it was to the company. At this point I wasn't involved in any of this. The first few of months the xx staff members were supposed to be sharing information with the offshore people and the 4th month it was supposed to be only the offshore team doing all the work with the xx staff completely hands off. Then almost every one of the xx companies IT staff would be let go. But in reality it didn't go like that.
Of course the xx company staff were unhappy about losing their jobs. They weren't very forthcoming with information to the offshore team. Even in the 4th/final month the xx employees were still doing most of the work. To make things worse, our company did not find competent employees with mainframe knowledge in India. At this point in the outsourcing world mainframe knowledge was scarce in India. It is not taught in India colleges, same as it is not taught in American colleges.
In the first month of the contract after the xx employees were laid off things did not go well. The offshore Production Control team messed up the first Payroll and more than 5,000 employees didn't get paid. It gets a lot of attention when everyone including the CEO does not get paid. Employees with automated withdrawals overdrew their accounts. It was a huge mess. Then it got worse. The offshore Production Control messed up the financials and xx company couldn't report their earnings to wall street. The first mistake only affected the company internally but the second one was very public. The third mistake significantly overpaid and significantly underpaid some external contractors and bills. This caused another very visible/messy problem. The final problem of the first month was that the employees didn't get paid ….. again. Including the CEO(again). It was at this point they reached out to my boss and asked if they could get some help. Mary and I were enlisted.
Mary and I didn't know that we were walking into a huge hornets nest. Our first day (dripping wet) we found that we had to figure out this companies processing. Immediately. This is a large task. All issues needed to be resolved immediately and of course the offshore team was less than helpful(useless) and the original employees were long gone. Our boss knew a few things and there were clues here and there. We struggled to make it through the first day.
Company xx's mainframe processing hadn't been updated over the years. They were stuck in the late 1980's. For example, I wondered why I had to keep plugging in dates everywhere. Sometimes today's date, sometimes yesterday's. Different date formats every time. It was a struggle. This is a computer. It knows today's date. Another example was where we needed to balance the financials. The task was to find the correct values from the reports and add and subtract them to make sure that the ins and outs balanced with what is in the accounts. Occasionally like in currency conversions there was even a multiplication. It was a long process with many numbers…..but the numbers were all available to the computer and adding, subtracting and multiplication are simple to a computer. However…. to make all this work would require a very significant number of hours to program. All of this should have been done by the application programming teams but at this point it was up to us to make our day to day jobs easier. During the day from 8 to 5 we did what was required for that night's processing. We would grab a quick dinner. Then we would write code late into the night and early morning. The client was very angry at first and getting anything from them was difficult. Slowly, over time, they realized that at least we knew what we were doing. For them that was at least an improvement over the offshore people. Over time the clients found that the two of us were able to function as well as the 7 or 8 previous employees….. They slowly started to warm up to us….We continued our late night programming. Sometimes working until 2am-3am in our Marriot rooms. Over the next few months, processing slowly got better and better. The client realized that things were running even better than before. We had automated many of the day to day simple tasks and removed the errors that had always popped up due to human error.
Our bosses also recognized that we had pulled the contract from the brink of failure to a success. We got some additional cash and one night one of the higher ups took the two of us out to a very nice restaurant. I spent the next year trying to replicate their thick cut pork chops.
It could never have been done without Mary.
Comments
Post a Comment