Warning signs of a failing outsourcer

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

It is 2021 and unfortunately on Friday I felt the need to repost “Dear Customer, The Truth about IT“. Little has changed in the 10 years since I wrote the original – if I was writing it today probably the only thing I would change is “IT”, I’d write “Digital” (I should probably also change Manchester United but …).

Unfortunately the vast majority of supplier’s are engaged on the basis of their marketing materials, sales pitch and promises. This tells you nothing about their actual ability to deliver working software. The suppliers can all hire great marketing people and use the same words. They can hire and incentivise the best sales people, and they can all take you out for a good meal, a round of golf or to a strip-club. (O, and they can all find a few “satisfied customers” to provide a testimony.)

The only real way to know if a supplier can deliver is to see them in action. So how can you tell things might be going wrong? What are the warning signs?

With help from Mike Burrows and John Clapham I’ve came up with this list of early warning signs. We were thinking in the context of a client-supplier (outsourced) relationship but many of them apply if you are working with internal teams too.

Staffing

1) Supplier loads teams up with extra managers: test managers a speciality
1.1) Team members don’t make decisions and defer problems to managers: there is a manager for every problem
1.2) Offshore teams have parallel management hierarchies
1.3) Suppliers feel the need to mark all your managers with their own manager (who is then duplicated offshore)

2) Inverted staffing pyramids (few devs at the bottom, lots of managers, BAs & other non-coders above)

3) People get swapped by suppliers with little notice
3.1) Short term substitutions are made: I once saw a supplier bring in a temporary SAP HR consultant to cover the usual consultant’s 2-week holiday. There was no way the substitute could come up to speed in that time let alone contribute positively.
3.2) People bait & switch: the people you meet first met didn’t last long, they were substituted for inexperienced people
3.3) “I can do that” – you get people new to their role, you get who they have available, people with experience in one role fill another role; a project manager plays coach, a delivery manager plays scrum master

4) Part time assignees (particularly managers): work a few hours a week on the project, see 1.1.

Get ready

5) Long running “set up” phases
5.1) You spend longer pondering the future than the time it takes to create the future
5.2) A lot of time is spent agonising about infrastructure changes rather than just doing them
5.3) Team advocates for, and does, investment in infrastructure and “reusable code” before anything is usable is actually delivered

Reporting not delivering

6) Supplier does not deliver working software

7) Supplier does not deliver working software every two weeks

In 2021 delivering working software to production every two weeks, or at least usable, potentially releasable software, is table stakes. The best teams deliver multiple times a day. If the supplier can’t deliver something by the end of week 4 you have a second rate supplier. Get out now.

8) Reporting hours done rather than demonstrating working software and stories

9) “Watermelon report” Green on the outside when everything inside is Red; impressive looking reports which don’t distract from the fact that nothing, or very little, was actually complete
9.1) Claiming stuff is done when it hasn’t finished testing
9.2) A Definition of Done which leaves work not-done – Mike has a good post at agendashift.com/done.

Other warning signs

10) You invest as much time in their org design as your own, if this starts to include people performance monitoring and management what are you gaining over using your own people?

11) Suppliers always say yes: no push back and no negotiation, feedback and scrutiny of your requests are signs they are paying attention to your needs. It you ask for the impossible it is better the supplier tells you so than accepts what you ask for. Ideally you want a supplier who can highlight the difficulties with your suggestion and work with you to achieve something akin to what you want even if you have to rethink your request.

12) Your own people are disenfranchised/disgruntled/frustrated by the arrangement. Particularly noticeable where people are expected to work in a different time zone to suit the other partly and when outsourcer staff are elevated (faster, smarter, etc) over the existing people.

In most of these cases the supplier is working around their own constraints rather than putting your needs first.


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