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by James Robertson.
Original Post: ON Agility and Lean development
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Keith Ray posts some thought provoking analysis of outsourcing - relating it to the movement of the garment industry and the manufacturing job losses in the US. The whole article is worth reading - here's one of the quotes keith pulls:
For example, see Johanna Rothman's blog: "I'm convinced that the reasons outsourcing works is that it forces organizations to document requirements and the outsourcers work on only one project at a time. The outsourcers' management can then choose any number of useful product development practices that increase the outsourcers' productivity. Management can't change their minds and refocus the outsourced project(s) in the same way they feel free to refocus the internal projects.".
The problem is lack of focus and lack of productivity - outsourcing works because the contracts signed at least force focus (even if they can't force productivity). Since IT shops have historically lacked focus and productivity, gaining one of the two at a lower cost looks like a great deal to CEOs. Here's another thought that has resonance in our industry:
With that kind of example, the early adopters tried it and found that it solved a lot of endemic problems. In the last two decades it's become the 'heads up' thing to do in manufacturing, but only now is the effect on inventory turns becoming aparent in the US national statistics.
And that is without full participation from the industrial establishment. If manufacturing was fully Lean, you wouldn't see jobs going overseas. It's impossible to operate a pull environment when one of your processing steps takes a month to transport goods by ship. That's old Henry Ford / Frederik Taylor thinking.
Now relate that back to development. How easy is it to deal with changing requirements in an environment where the developers are 12 hours distant (timezone) and a day's plane ride away? Where the language and cultural barrier creates easy misunderstandings? If your locally based developers were actually doing the right thing, then outsourcing overseas would clearly be slower and - over time, from an ROI standpoint - more expensive. The problem is, they don't do the right things. They follow language and platform fads. They reject changing requirements. They diss users, speaking of them with contempt.
And then, they are astonished - just like the auto factory workers with their byzantine work rules - when the jobs migrate somewhere else.
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