5-14-10 You Can't Do Everything

Continuing the theme of discussing survey participant extra input and comments…..

One of my participants talked a little about outsourcing. His comment was that his department was utilizing resources from both Russia and India. “Many of our engineers do not like the idea of sending work outside our country (and company!) and are not supporting this effort. Without their engagement, it becomes very difficult to get full potential from foreign partners.”

Okay, yeah, in the US outsourcing has a really bad name. Moving jobs off-shore, and all that. But the fact is there isn’t any company that can do EVERYTHING. In this case, we just couldn’t hire enough engineers (of all types) to get all the work done on a timely basis. So the thinking was, let’s move some of the grunt work, like drafting functions, to off-shore firms. That would free up our very experienced engineers to do the critical functions like stress and design.

But it seemed that no matter how we explained it, our engineers weren’t buying into the concept. And if they don’t buy in, then they don’t provide the guidance and the interface that their foreign counterparts need to do their jobs. And you end up with elegantly designed product that comes out like crap in the drawings. Not a good situation.

So how to solve this problem? Given that there was no choice about outsourcing to foreign firms, there are a couple of potential solutions.

For example, it helps to bring a large cadre of the foreign engineers in-house for an extended period of time. It aids in developing the engineer-to-engineer relationships that are needed for the long haul. After you have set next to and worked directly with someone for the last 4 or 6 months, it is very difficult to ignore their phone calls or requests for information later on. It is all about establishing the one to one relationships.

Another solution is to recruit a senior engineer and place him/her in country with the contract firm. This person then becomes the liaison between the engineers at home and the engineers in the foreign organization. It has to be a senior engineer…. One that has not only the technical experience but also has the network of contacts throughout the home organization. He/she then uses these established home office relationships to get the data and information that the contract firm needs to be successful.

You’ll notice that both solutions are all about relationships. Probably the first solution is better than the second in terms of relationships. This is simply because it establishes multiple person-to-person relationships between the organizations rather than a single conduit between organizations. However, both are viable alternatives to those times where your organization just can’t do everything.

Cheers!