So what do we mean by the term Offshoring for the Newbie Project Manager?
“It is the relocation of business processes to a lower cost location, usually overseas”.
In theory this looks an almost “too good to be true” opportunity to increase profits through reduced production costs via the exploitation of cheap foreign labour. The expectation with respect to IT software development is a promise of cost reductions in the region of 30% to 40%. The management consultants convince clients that all you needed to do in order to encapsulate this cost saving into your balance sheet, is to carry out, with their help, an IT staff change-over similar to changing out an old car engine and replacing it with a new one made in India or China. Make this happen and “he presto you’re in the money”.
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With annual IT Project Failure Rates running at 70% + it is clear that improvements in the professionalism of IT project staff and management should be a part of the solution.
In my post Can Government Policy Reduce IT Project Failure Rates Part 2, I described how the government could assist in making this disgraceful state of affairs a thing of the past. One of these was to make it a legal requirement for certain key IT Professionals to have Chartered Qualifications before being allowed to work on IT Projects /Programmes of work above a certain budgetary value.
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I am sure many of my regular readers are aware of the huge number of comments and long running dialogue concerning my post Agile Fails to Get to Grips with Human Psychology.
Chaplin’s “Modern Times”
Recently one of my regular commenter’s decided to bring up an age old argument of Systems versus Individuals or better known as Taylor Vs Deming. I am conscious that a post working through my opinion on this age old argument is something more befitting a book rather than a short blog post, and as such I am in danger of over simplifying a very complex issue and it’s relevance to the software industry.
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I promise in the next few weeks to concentrate on other subjects other than AGILE and its deficiencies, but my readership statistics show that AGILE is a popular subject. I also feel I have to keep up with my protagonists comments, which are appearing not just on my blog but all over the net.
At the moment, the net is buzzing with AGILE evangelist websites and Blogs making statements like “the AGILE manifesto is the equivalent to Newton 4th Law of Motion”. When someone takes a fanatical belief in anything without proper empirical evidence you have got to start thinking!!. Please see my post Storm in a Tea Cup. I really think these evangelists do not expect us to engage our brains. They think if they keep repeating the common look-up list of humorous slogans about AGILE’s invincibility, we will all be conditioned into turning a blind eye to the detail and asking for verifiable and independent evidence concerning this approach’s claimed scalability and prowess over other methods /approaches. At the moment the whole IT methods industry from Waterfall to RUP to AGILE and SCRUM is in need of consolidation based on some sound independent research. As we speak, large corporations take huge “flip flop” financial gambles adopting this method over another, largely based on the word of lightweight fee-earning consultants.
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During the week Computing Magazine, one of the best freebee computer magazines I know, dropped through the front door. All was going well until I reached the analysis section and Fig 1 :-
Fig 1 Government versus non-government adoption of AGILE
It states that AGILE another “No Pain High Gain” methodology is on the ascendance, and appears to be taking the intellectual high ground.
However, it looks to me like a suffocating fish trying to trash about in a useless attempt to find the next potential life saver. This trendily named method is nothing new, as I have come across it at various points throughout my IT career. However, in those days it was referred to as the SOP (Seat of the Pants) or JFDI (Just F***King Do It) development method. These names don’t sound so good do they? Such approaches to system development only work in a limited range of circumstance for systems of a particular type /level of complexity. In my view AGILE is nothing more than a posh word for hacking together software.
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