Post by dangerclose on Mar 5, 2012 13:26:36 GMT
Why Legal and Generals decision to outsource software development to TCS will not only hit their bottom line but also undermines one of the very disciplines that UK PLC will need to be competitive and prosperous in the years ahead.
This is a Call to Arms
This is a “call to arms” for a cause. A cause that is bigger than the loss of our jobs, bigger even than the future of L&G itself. It's about the future prosperity of the country.
Let me explain. The queues outside the Northern Rock bank back in the Autumn of 2007 were the start of a cataclysm of Hollywood proportions. With Greece teetering on the verge of default some 5 years later it’s a cataclysm which is still being played out today and its long term effects are unknown. But what the banking crisis did do was make UK Politicians, the media and the “thought leaders” in Britain wake up to two facts; firstly that the UK cannot rely solely on the finance sector to provide us with prosperity. Secondly they realised that the manufacturing industry had been right all along, we need to make things and export them. To put it in more economic language we need to re-balance the economy. To this end the current coalition Government, and other groups notably, the Royal Society, Google and many “under the radar”, voluntary groups have been attempting to start the re-balancing process. However UK PLC is big ship, changing its course will take time. Its a long term project.
One of the thrusts in the struggle to re-balance the economy is focused on the education sector, especially in the area of how IT (know as ICT in schools) is taught. The current teaching of ICT in schools mainly covers how to use office products; word processors, spreadsheets etc. These are all essential skills for the majority of workers these days, but minimal if any basic computer science is taught. It’s been said ,but I cannot remember who by, that modern children have learnt how to consume the Internet and mobile technologies but not how to mold or create them. But with the release of the Raspberry PI computer and even the Education Minister Michael Gove focusing his energies and our tax money on proper computer science training, I believe we've started to turn a corner. A band wagon whose purpose is to focus the nation on our need, UK PLC's need, to produce high class graduates across the IT spectrum has started to role. Now don't get me wrong, this is not an easy journey there will be lots of bit falls and mistakes along them way. I'm not stating that we are round the corner from having a manufacturing sector as successful as Germany's.
But what has this “movement” got to do with L&G decision to outsource us to TCS back in 07/08. Well we need to re-balance the economy in order to for us to prosper as a country, we are starting to inspire and educate kids to be the new engineers we the British people will need for that re-balancing, but who pray tell is going to employ them! Who is going to see their potential in making companies more efficient and agile in an increasing complex and global market. Google? Yes, but they cannot employ all of them. And it is this issue on which I wish to make my stand. L&G have failed; they have failed to value quality British (black, white, Asian but onshore) engineers.
How have they failed?
One of the main functions of the owners/directors of any company is to provide shareholder value. There are many skills required to carry out this duty, but one of them is to come up with creative entrepreneurial solutions to market change. L&G knows that it needs good efficient IT systems in order to remain competitive in the market place. However they perceived that IT development within the company was too expensive and often failed to deliver the business value the company required. This problem they believed had two causes. Firstly the business users (“The Business”) were continually unable to adequately define in a timely manner what the IT systems they wanted should do. This was a justifiable complaint and I have to say, looking at the history of IT projects globally a common theme. Secondly the salaries of the BA’s , Technical Architects and the Private First Class grunt software engineers was too high. Now the IT industry itself has come up with a number of solutions to the perennial problem of failing IT projects over the years. And some of these solutions appear to work. But behind closed doors, without consultation with the very staff struggling against the odds to produce excellent solutions for them they came up with their own spreadsheet based “creative and entrepreneurial solution” to the problem. Outsource the whole department to a cheap offshore based provider. OUTSTANDING! I guess L&G thought this was a good idea because it would solve their two problems as follows:
1) By outsourcing IT development they would “force” the business to get their act together, as diddling about with requirements would suddenly cost them money, as constant alterations would be chargeable
2) By outsourcing to India (or some other low cost base economy) and ensuring that the contract was written in such a way as to force the provider into year on year increases in the ratio of offshore to onshore staff they would save money.
All they needed to do to make the second facet of the solution work was to provide enough rules, procedures and spreadsheets to ensure that the provider did deliver. But similar rules and procedures had failed when the department was internal. Surprise surprise they are failing now.
Why do I say that its failing when all the utterances coming from TCS and L&G, say how great the relationship is and how its successfully providing L&G with the systems they need. Why? Because spin and propaganda are always used to cover the truth. We all know the truth because we've seen it from the inside, underneath the glossy annual report exterior. Nothing they say has any credibility. They might be able to fool the markets and the media but we know better
So beneath the propaganda what is the reality. Well the businesses ability to create even adequate requirements has got worse. The original inadequacies in the provision of decent requirements has been made worse by the lose of experienced Business Analysts at L&G.
Lets pick apart the other aspect of the deal, the cost cutting. This was to be brought about by the contractual obligation on TCS to increase the offshore/onshore ratio year on year or pay a large fine. To this end TCS shed 20-30 more on-shore ex-L&Gers at the end of 2010 in order to not pay the fine. The increase in ratio was based on the presumption that as staff hours moved offshore the domain and system specific knowledge the staff had was to be knowledge transferred (KT'd) to our new offshore colleagues, before our onshore hours got cut to zero permanently. Well knowledge transfer may have looked like a easy task when it was written into the outsourcing contract, but who in their right mind, if they'd actually understood how KT actually works have signed up to it. Well obviously only those clever enough to believe the following analogy; that a consultant heart surgeon with 15 years experience could "knowledge transfer" his experience to a constantly changing set of St Johns ambulance amateurs, by writing some official document (with diagram of course) and going through an hours Webex.
The reality of KT.
So what happens in KT in reality. You start by trying to disseminate your many years of knowledge and experience of the development language you use its frameworks, its best practices, plus your domain and system knowledge to someone who at best has had a 3 month Java 'intense' training course and if your lucky 2 years junior experience on project where their hands were constantly held. If your really lucky your newbie will stay for the whole project, before they leave the account, taking with them whatever knowledge they did pick up. If your unlucky they leave half way through the project to be replaced by another newbie. As you can see this is about as sane as my heart surgeon analogy. You cannot learn the skills involved in this discipline from a manual or video conference and more than you can heart surgury. It was this blind belief that KT is effective in this way, this act of ignorance, that destroys the financial model that L&G used to justify the outsourcing deal. To state it more clearly L&G assumption is that any group of basic level engineering graduates (and that is any kind of engineering mechanical, chemical whatever) with 3 months Java training and a set of requirements documents can produce a highly complex computer system. You know what? They can’t.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe its worse.
Well at least I believe this was L&G's understanding of KT, because I assumed they did a proper due diligence on how the KT was to be performed. Maybe they didn't; I'd heard that L&G were sold on the idea that TCS has thousands of highly skilled, highly trained, highly experienced software engineers, that no mention was made of three month crash course in Java. Maybe that wasn't in TCS's sales brochure. You would have thought however that the directors at L&G were smart enough to not believe everything the TCS sales person told them. Or maybe, just maybe L&G didn't give a damn. They'd made their decision and would do anything to believe that it was the correct one.
Don't get me wrong
Now don't get me wrong, there are some damn good software engineers at TCS, I’ve met them, I willingly shake their hands and treat them as equals or mentors. This is not a race issue. I do sometimes wonder if L&G thought we'd stay quiet as we'd be too worried about the PC brigade and being labeled racist. I've met some bloody good Indian software engineers and some really scarily crap white one. But in my experience on the L&G account, despite what their technical staff's internal CV’s say most of their 'developers' are hopelessly inadequate to the task. L&G believed that they could get a company to produce quality “products” aka internal business systems, at half the price of the original department. But these “products” are not repeatable widgets repetitively stamped out on some factory conveyor belt, they are highly complex one-off solutions. Most of the TCS technical staff (well the ones I’ve met and heard about) are just not up to the job, they need too much hand holding. And because many of them, either have one eye on being a work package manager for which no technical ability is required or because they just lack commitment or the aptitude to be an IT professional then they continue to need their hands to be held. In fact this never stops. Eventually they leave the account and pass on their new found knowledge, which usually amounts to “ring this number in the UK, they'll help you” This needless to say is not good and at the end of the day hits L&G bottom line, maybe not right now but at some point in the future.
L&G's bottom line
How does it hit L&G bottom line; because the low quality software (trust me I've seen the code) that TCS provides to L&G will fail L&G in two fundamental ways.
1) Low quality software costs more to maintain
2) Low quality software is harder to adapt to a changing market.
Finally and most critically; even with the those ex-L&Gers that TCS still has, and there are so few, TCS do not have the intellectual manpower to provide L&G with a new big system. The system and domain experience required to produce a new big system for L&G has gone, lost in the joke of KT.
Conclusion
But we all know all this, (well L&G do now) so why am I preaching to the choir. For two reasons. Firstly because I'm sure that both L&G and TCS monitor this board. Well this is a shot across L&G bows. I’ve already stated this country needs and will need quality engineers. And L&G are part of a backward thinking, narrowly focused, limited and uncreative group of companies who believe that complex software engineering solutions can be produced by badly trained people who have little or no aptitude for professional careers in software engineering. They espouse directly or indirectly the belief that anyone with a basic engineering degree and a specification document written with enough precision and detail can produce a quality of system. Well the future prosperity of this country, in fact our kid’s prosperity depends on this lie being stoned, killed, demolished, destroyed and buried.
Now listen well
You may have kicked the self respect out of every techie, BA and member of staff you outsourced to TCS. Too many have given up hope. But not me even if I am a one person army. Be on it my own or with others I will oppose the lie you’ve helped to propagated. A lie that will continue to damage the future prosperity of this country. So directors/senior managers/whoever at L&G consider this a declaration of war. A war to oppose your ignorant, ill thought out idea. And remember you are fighting for your next years share price related bonuses, I’m fighting for my kids future.
Dear friends in the choir.
When you take on an opponent who is bigger than you and has more resources, I feel that's is best to go for a Vietcong type strategy rather than a Saddam Hussein type strategy. Bye for now
Follow me on Twitter – www.twitter.com/KWDDangerclose . I'm using hashtag #L>CS
References
www.believeindandt.org.uk/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16515275
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education
www.raspberrypi.org/
www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-schools-ict-overhaul-proposals
This is a Call to Arms
This is a “call to arms” for a cause. A cause that is bigger than the loss of our jobs, bigger even than the future of L&G itself. It's about the future prosperity of the country.
Let me explain. The queues outside the Northern Rock bank back in the Autumn of 2007 were the start of a cataclysm of Hollywood proportions. With Greece teetering on the verge of default some 5 years later it’s a cataclysm which is still being played out today and its long term effects are unknown. But what the banking crisis did do was make UK Politicians, the media and the “thought leaders” in Britain wake up to two facts; firstly that the UK cannot rely solely on the finance sector to provide us with prosperity. Secondly they realised that the manufacturing industry had been right all along, we need to make things and export them. To put it in more economic language we need to re-balance the economy. To this end the current coalition Government, and other groups notably, the Royal Society, Google and many “under the radar”, voluntary groups have been attempting to start the re-balancing process. However UK PLC is big ship, changing its course will take time. Its a long term project.
One of the thrusts in the struggle to re-balance the economy is focused on the education sector, especially in the area of how IT (know as ICT in schools) is taught. The current teaching of ICT in schools mainly covers how to use office products; word processors, spreadsheets etc. These are all essential skills for the majority of workers these days, but minimal if any basic computer science is taught. It’s been said ,but I cannot remember who by, that modern children have learnt how to consume the Internet and mobile technologies but not how to mold or create them. But with the release of the Raspberry PI computer and even the Education Minister Michael Gove focusing his energies and our tax money on proper computer science training, I believe we've started to turn a corner. A band wagon whose purpose is to focus the nation on our need, UK PLC's need, to produce high class graduates across the IT spectrum has started to role. Now don't get me wrong, this is not an easy journey there will be lots of bit falls and mistakes along them way. I'm not stating that we are round the corner from having a manufacturing sector as successful as Germany's.
But what has this “movement” got to do with L&G decision to outsource us to TCS back in 07/08. Well we need to re-balance the economy in order to for us to prosper as a country, we are starting to inspire and educate kids to be the new engineers we the British people will need for that re-balancing, but who pray tell is going to employ them! Who is going to see their potential in making companies more efficient and agile in an increasing complex and global market. Google? Yes, but they cannot employ all of them. And it is this issue on which I wish to make my stand. L&G have failed; they have failed to value quality British (black, white, Asian but onshore) engineers.
How have they failed?
One of the main functions of the owners/directors of any company is to provide shareholder value. There are many skills required to carry out this duty, but one of them is to come up with creative entrepreneurial solutions to market change. L&G knows that it needs good efficient IT systems in order to remain competitive in the market place. However they perceived that IT development within the company was too expensive and often failed to deliver the business value the company required. This problem they believed had two causes. Firstly the business users (“The Business”) were continually unable to adequately define in a timely manner what the IT systems they wanted should do. This was a justifiable complaint and I have to say, looking at the history of IT projects globally a common theme. Secondly the salaries of the BA’s , Technical Architects and the Private First Class grunt software engineers was too high. Now the IT industry itself has come up with a number of solutions to the perennial problem of failing IT projects over the years. And some of these solutions appear to work. But behind closed doors, without consultation with the very staff struggling against the odds to produce excellent solutions for them they came up with their own spreadsheet based “creative and entrepreneurial solution” to the problem. Outsource the whole department to a cheap offshore based provider. OUTSTANDING! I guess L&G thought this was a good idea because it would solve their two problems as follows:
1) By outsourcing IT development they would “force” the business to get their act together, as diddling about with requirements would suddenly cost them money, as constant alterations would be chargeable
2) By outsourcing to India (or some other low cost base economy) and ensuring that the contract was written in such a way as to force the provider into year on year increases in the ratio of offshore to onshore staff they would save money.
All they needed to do to make the second facet of the solution work was to provide enough rules, procedures and spreadsheets to ensure that the provider did deliver. But similar rules and procedures had failed when the department was internal. Surprise surprise they are failing now.
Why do I say that its failing when all the utterances coming from TCS and L&G, say how great the relationship is and how its successfully providing L&G with the systems they need. Why? Because spin and propaganda are always used to cover the truth. We all know the truth because we've seen it from the inside, underneath the glossy annual report exterior. Nothing they say has any credibility. They might be able to fool the markets and the media but we know better
So beneath the propaganda what is the reality. Well the businesses ability to create even adequate requirements has got worse. The original inadequacies in the provision of decent requirements has been made worse by the lose of experienced Business Analysts at L&G.
Lets pick apart the other aspect of the deal, the cost cutting. This was to be brought about by the contractual obligation on TCS to increase the offshore/onshore ratio year on year or pay a large fine. To this end TCS shed 20-30 more on-shore ex-L&Gers at the end of 2010 in order to not pay the fine. The increase in ratio was based on the presumption that as staff hours moved offshore the domain and system specific knowledge the staff had was to be knowledge transferred (KT'd) to our new offshore colleagues, before our onshore hours got cut to zero permanently. Well knowledge transfer may have looked like a easy task when it was written into the outsourcing contract, but who in their right mind, if they'd actually understood how KT actually works have signed up to it. Well obviously only those clever enough to believe the following analogy; that a consultant heart surgeon with 15 years experience could "knowledge transfer" his experience to a constantly changing set of St Johns ambulance amateurs, by writing some official document (with diagram of course) and going through an hours Webex.
The reality of KT.
So what happens in KT in reality. You start by trying to disseminate your many years of knowledge and experience of the development language you use its frameworks, its best practices, plus your domain and system knowledge to someone who at best has had a 3 month Java 'intense' training course and if your lucky 2 years junior experience on project where their hands were constantly held. If your really lucky your newbie will stay for the whole project, before they leave the account, taking with them whatever knowledge they did pick up. If your unlucky they leave half way through the project to be replaced by another newbie. As you can see this is about as sane as my heart surgeon analogy. You cannot learn the skills involved in this discipline from a manual or video conference and more than you can heart surgury. It was this blind belief that KT is effective in this way, this act of ignorance, that destroys the financial model that L&G used to justify the outsourcing deal. To state it more clearly L&G assumption is that any group of basic level engineering graduates (and that is any kind of engineering mechanical, chemical whatever) with 3 months Java training and a set of requirements documents can produce a highly complex computer system. You know what? They can’t.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe its worse.
Well at least I believe this was L&G's understanding of KT, because I assumed they did a proper due diligence on how the KT was to be performed. Maybe they didn't; I'd heard that L&G were sold on the idea that TCS has thousands of highly skilled, highly trained, highly experienced software engineers, that no mention was made of three month crash course in Java. Maybe that wasn't in TCS's sales brochure. You would have thought however that the directors at L&G were smart enough to not believe everything the TCS sales person told them. Or maybe, just maybe L&G didn't give a damn. They'd made their decision and would do anything to believe that it was the correct one.
Don't get me wrong
Now don't get me wrong, there are some damn good software engineers at TCS, I’ve met them, I willingly shake their hands and treat them as equals or mentors. This is not a race issue. I do sometimes wonder if L&G thought we'd stay quiet as we'd be too worried about the PC brigade and being labeled racist. I've met some bloody good Indian software engineers and some really scarily crap white one. But in my experience on the L&G account, despite what their technical staff's internal CV’s say most of their 'developers' are hopelessly inadequate to the task. L&G believed that they could get a company to produce quality “products” aka internal business systems, at half the price of the original department. But these “products” are not repeatable widgets repetitively stamped out on some factory conveyor belt, they are highly complex one-off solutions. Most of the TCS technical staff (well the ones I’ve met and heard about) are just not up to the job, they need too much hand holding. And because many of them, either have one eye on being a work package manager for which no technical ability is required or because they just lack commitment or the aptitude to be an IT professional then they continue to need their hands to be held. In fact this never stops. Eventually they leave the account and pass on their new found knowledge, which usually amounts to “ring this number in the UK, they'll help you” This needless to say is not good and at the end of the day hits L&G bottom line, maybe not right now but at some point in the future.
L&G's bottom line
How does it hit L&G bottom line; because the low quality software (trust me I've seen the code) that TCS provides to L&G will fail L&G in two fundamental ways.
1) Low quality software costs more to maintain
2) Low quality software is harder to adapt to a changing market.
Finally and most critically; even with the those ex-L&Gers that TCS still has, and there are so few, TCS do not have the intellectual manpower to provide L&G with a new big system. The system and domain experience required to produce a new big system for L&G has gone, lost in the joke of KT.
Conclusion
But we all know all this, (well L&G do now) so why am I preaching to the choir. For two reasons. Firstly because I'm sure that both L&G and TCS monitor this board. Well this is a shot across L&G bows. I’ve already stated this country needs and will need quality engineers. And L&G are part of a backward thinking, narrowly focused, limited and uncreative group of companies who believe that complex software engineering solutions can be produced by badly trained people who have little or no aptitude for professional careers in software engineering. They espouse directly or indirectly the belief that anyone with a basic engineering degree and a specification document written with enough precision and detail can produce a quality of system. Well the future prosperity of this country, in fact our kid’s prosperity depends on this lie being stoned, killed, demolished, destroyed and buried.
Now listen well
You may have kicked the self respect out of every techie, BA and member of staff you outsourced to TCS. Too many have given up hope. But not me even if I am a one person army. Be on it my own or with others I will oppose the lie you’ve helped to propagated. A lie that will continue to damage the future prosperity of this country. So directors/senior managers/whoever at L&G consider this a declaration of war. A war to oppose your ignorant, ill thought out idea. And remember you are fighting for your next years share price related bonuses, I’m fighting for my kids future.
Dear friends in the choir.
When you take on an opponent who is bigger than you and has more resources, I feel that's is best to go for a Vietcong type strategy rather than a Saddam Hussein type strategy. Bye for now
Follow me on Twitter – www.twitter.com/KWDDangerclose . I'm using hashtag #L>CS
References
www.believeindandt.org.uk/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16515275
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education
www.raspberrypi.org/
www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-schools-ict-overhaul-proposals