Outsourcing From Hell
Many years ago, when outsourcing first became a thing, you would often see phrases like, “you can’t outsource a problem”. That can be interpreted in several ways, but one which comes to mind is the idea that if you can’t properly define what you need, how can you expect someone to deliver the solution to your prayers?
During the early days of outsourcing there were many horror stories, but in my opinion many of them were self-inflicted. Companies with terrible project management believed that a load of cheap offshore workers would somehow make up for the fact the project manager didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Companies not putting in the effort up front to understand their requirements, then moaning about what was delivered. Companies who had no understanding of the product/development stack had no way to judge the competence of the offshore team they hired. These sort of problems caused internal development teams to fail, so of course they would also cause outsourced teams to fail.
If you are having problems with internal development teams, outsourced teams and external vendor relationships, how can you not turn this around and ask yourself the question, “could I/we be the problem?”
Fragile, not Agile
How many times have you heard people/companies talk about agile, while insisting on doing everything possible to make sure agile becomes fragile? Those same people/companies will then insist that agile is not all it’s cracked up to be. This sort of nonsense lead a group of us to come up with this, mocking what we were seeing…
There is no framework or methodology you can’t screw up if you are an idiot.
DevOops, not DevOps
Much like Agile, DevOps has been one of those things people love to talk about without even doing some basic reading. Either they are quick to point out the limitations of DevOps, or even outwardly promote it, while sabotaging it from within to protect their silos.
If you have totally dysfunctional silos, the chances are you are not going to save yourself with DevOps, because the people that allowed those silos to become dysfunctional will want to wield control over DevOps, thereby guaranteeing it will fail.
Dark Clouds on the Horizon
In a repeat of the “you can’t outsource a problem” issue, the cloud isn’t magic. There is a lot of stuff you need to understand before you can do something successfully on the cloud. Stuff like pricing, security, network topology, platform offerings, “best practices”, hybrid (cloud + on-prem) systems all need to be considered before you start building anything. Just because you can fire up a VM in the cloud in 30 seconds, it doesn’t mean it is sound to build your business around that…
There have been numerous stories over the years where companies have turned cloud hype into cloud hell. It’s not because there is something inherently wrong with the cloud. It’s because the company has a broken approach to everything, so of course they failed when they launched into their cloud initiative…
Conclusion
Before you launch into a tirade about how X is crap and Y is much better, just make sure it’s not you that’s the problem. Stupid is as stupid does!
Cheers
Tim…
