Streching the limits

It’s an old adage that in rough time nothing favors you and all news reaching to you is "bad news"; I was also facing rough times since the start of this financial year after few of my key resources from application development and maintenance decided to part away. Though at ground level there was a lot of action and restructuring happening at the technology front; newer resources were getting aligned, but it didn’t bought cheer to the colleagues who had decided to part away.

I was working on an important assignment of restructuring the physical hardware infrastructure and delivery model. My core skills being into applications, development and program management with little exposure to the infrastructure, I was thrilled with the new assignment, but on the contrary the network team felt nerves, as most of the infrastructure was moving towards managed services and they can sense a threat to their job, sensing the smoke of uncertainty they decided to part away.

This was like a double whammy for me as I was already struggling with regular development, maintenance and management task on top of it the infrastructure management team started shirking. At given point of time I appeared too much occupied with multiple types of responsibilities that too without having enough resources to answer the never ending dynamic requirements and challenges of typical IT setup.

I was bit worried and alone to understand the criticality of resources or to respond to contingent situations; it was getting difficult for me to answer all requirements, there were multiple challenges at every level and to me it appeared as if I’m fighting the lone battle. At times I appeared like an enterprise in myself, an institution which has knowledge and understanding of all the happenings in the vicinity.

But one can’t think of running the organization with this proposition, building in-house capacity or getting resources on an immediate basis was difficult. I explored an idea with my former colleagues and known associates of outsourcing certain activities which were not our core business.

The advantages of outsourcing started getting reflected, we could manage two independent consultants in less than half of the cost of a dedicated resource also with a high availability of 24X7. There are recruitment errors and so were some errors in vendor selection as well, a handful assignment with the consultants didn’t worked well and they were not able to provide solutions for some of our requirements.

But those were only one of the few cases and can be ignored. But the lesson learned is that the operations should be process driven and not person driven, with the lesson I started building In-house capabilities and capacities, though it will take some time to get fine tune and responding the requirements, but sooner or later they will take over the charge of consultants. I’m also happy with the newer dimensions getting added to the existing team as they are getting opportunity to work on different assignments.

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