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Matti Grönroos
Do You Pay for Work You Do Yourself?
At its worst, outsourcing trauma turns into the fact that the customer's old team – or even a single person – does not want to give away its own baby, and the way of working does not change.
The objectives of the outsourcing are not realized, an unnecessary complexity is created in the process and the customer pays the service provider for doing works which belong to the service provider.
Yes. In principle.
Quite often, a reaction of jealousy arises in these situations. Those are usually resulting from the worst and very common practices of the IT industry: Not Invented Here thinking: Those ones are in no way capable of performing those tasks like We are.
The worst scenario is Empire Strikes Back: the customer's staff counterattacks and tries to micromanage the service provider. The idea is the outsourcing is forgotten: it is not about bodyshopping but selling deliverables. The service provider manages its own staff, not the customer. The consequence of these situations may be that the supplier agrees to be micromanaged to please the customer, at least a little bit. The risk is that the economies of scale that were the basis of outsourcing will not be achieved when the service provider cannot act according to their own standards and methods.
Very strange situations arise when there is no trust between the customer and the service provider. The customer may want to have a seat in the decision-making chain even for trivial cases. The situation develops into Kafka-like madness if the service provider is not handed over access rights to resources for which it is responsible.
It the distrust leads to a value chain below, there is no question that any critical incidents can be resolved on time: The customer wants to approve all changes to the data base. The service provider A is responsbile for the design and contents of the data base, and the service provider B has sole access right to the database engine:
It is the task of the management to identify these situations. Of course, the service provider may help with identification, but recognition is not always its advantage. It gets awkward if a recognized expert gets angry and threatens to resign or at least hold his breath if his or her demands are not met. Even then, the management shall be firm and say that the company's interests come before the individual's ambitions.