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by James Robertson.
Original Post: IT Management never learns
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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The Mythical Man Month was written a long time ago now - 1975, specifically (re-released in 1995). Nothing much has changed. Managers still think that you can add more cooks and get broth sooner. Outsourcing - offshoring in particular - shows just how little we've learned. Can't get the job done with 3 developers in New York? How about with 20 in Bangalore then? Have a look at this ComputerWorld item:
as IT shops apply "brute-force programming techniques" with low-cost coders from India and elsewhere. That's the observation of Tom Bigelow, CEO of Performance Software Corp., a Phoenix-based developer of custom software for the aerospace industry. Bigelow says companies that hire offshore developers in bulk eventually hit a wall. That's because, as Frederick P. Brooks Jr. revealed in The Mythical Man-Month, his classic book on software engineering published nearly 30 years ago, you can't compress the time it takes to complete software simply by throwing more bodies at it -- not even in the Internet age. Most IT managers have been "mandated to cut x percent from their budget," Bigelow contends. So, many have grasped at the straw of offshore development with the hope of saving money and still getting big development jobs done. The frequent results, he says, are late projects, bad projects and dead projects. While upper management is busy updating its spreadsheets with lower-cost programmers from abroad, many midlevel IT managers are foundering as they try to control workgroups overseas, Bigelow says.
Boy, what a shocker - we throw requirements over a 12 timezone wall, and gadzooks - it doesn't work any better than when we threw them across the glass wall to IT.
Software development, hardware engineering, project management, accounting and many other jobs are just as vulnerable to cheap labor if the work offshore employees or contractors do can be coordinated inexpensively and efficiently with the on-shore company personnel and its customers. Companies might resist having software developed 8,000 miles away because they'd feel they were losing control of the process. Would they feel the same way with real-time video links to those remote resources? With instant data collaboration? All that holds back that level of techno-integration is the cost of the networking - the same cost that's falling like a rock in today's market. The better we make networks, the less network services cost, the lower the barriers to exporting technical jobs. Sad, but true.
Clearly, he has a point. But he leaves out one very critical thing - those guys you want to set up video links with who are 8000 miles away? When it's noon there, it's midnight here (and vice versa). Who's going to work late shift? US based project management? I'll be astonished when I see senior managers doing 1 AM conference calls. Sure, you can try and have the overseas staff work night shift - but that's not going to be possible for long. There's a burgeoning internal market in India (and China, etc) - how many staffers will work late nights when they don't have to? This all sounds very simple when all you look at is a spreadsheet. Life is more complicated than that.
Hmmm - maybe it's time to apply a cluestick to senior managers.
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