Re: Outsourcing and the falling dollar?

["Bill Swallow" <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I will wager that this company will see one of two possible outcomes:

1. Outsourcing will fail due to a lack of planning and understanding,
and they'll eat the cost of a loss (in some form or another) and will
re-hire back "onshore".

2. Outsourcing will fail due to a lack of planning and understanding,
but they'll either be blind to the impact or will choose to steady the
course anyway.

I'll admit, I'm very interested in "offshoring" and think it CAN work
given the right approach. The trick, from all that I've seen, is not
to replace existing staff with "cheaper" (that's misunderstanding
number 1) staff elsewhere, but to look "offshore" when growing your
teams.

Contrary to popular fear mongering, there are extremely bright and
capable people around the globe. The reason most "offshoring" efforts
fail is due to poor planning and poor communication. Most failed
attempts involve throwing work over to a remote group with thin
requirements and guidelines, and expecting immediate turnaround.

I like to hear from those in these "offshore" locations for their side
of the story. I am in touch with many, via mailing lists and via
personal contact, and do hear some very interesting stories. You can
bubble them up to "the company is asking for the impossible tomorrow,
and we don't even have everything we need from them yet!"

I will say, though, that it's interesting that the one writer
mentioned below decided to take the job remotely at a pay cut. I hope
they have a plan to turn this around for themselves inside a year. As
someone who has gone through his fair share of layoffs, I can honestly
say that only on the rarest of occasions would I ever go back to a
company that laid me off. That rare occasion would involve the
unfortunate situation where a struggling new company just doesn't have
the funds to keep people on and be a sustaining organization, but had
since been able to secure steady revenue and grow into a healthy
organization.

Bill

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 7:17 AM, Lech Rzedzicki <xchaotic -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> I personally have been a witness of a really slow moving company,
>  which, seeing how everyone had jumped to the offshoring bandwagon,
>  decided to do the same thing with Tech Writing department in 2008.
>  Dollar has fallen, salaries have gone up in the offshoring country,
>  but the plan was to go ahead so the're doing it now anyway.
>  Experienced people in the US were made redundant, they're still
>  looking for people in the new place and hire anyone who claims to have
>  heard about the term TW.
>  All this is bad in itself, but the sad/funny part is, one of the
>  original writers from the US applied and obviously got the job,
>  arranged with the HR department to work from US office so he's back to
>  his original position (albeit at a slight pay cut).

-- 
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
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