At the end of every year some things need to be done, some are because we are a public company while others are just planning for the future. We need to calculate what our profit is for our stock holders, we need to calculate how much in taxes to pay for the government and we want to make ours a lean organization.
One way to do that is try and consolidate as much as possible, get rid of things we don’t need and while we are at it why don’t we limit the number of vendors we do business with. This should mean we have fewer companies to negotiate contracts with, and we have fewer groups to discuss about pay increases with. The thought sounds pretty good, but does this really make sense?
This probably makes sense for those firms that have dozens or hundreds of people working for our company, but what about the HR group? Some of the custom HR systems are being managed by three guys, one from a small firm and the other two from a large consultancy. He has been here so long, it isn’t easy to simply replace the one guy, so we will force his company to go through the larger consultancy.
This is actually a double edged sword, now the consultancy has all three people which is a combined total of 23 man years experience on those systems. To make things even more interesting, they added a few extra clauses to this years contract. The contact now essentially says that these guys can work remotely unless there is a specific reason to work locally.
This sounds great for the consultancy, and even better should the client ever change their mind. I can pretty much imagine what is going to happen in about six months.
Client Well, actually we do get better service when your guys are on site
Consultancy Yup, not a problem the new rate for our guys on site is X.
Client Uh, wow, that seems like a bit much
Consultancy Well, the old rate was for mostly remote support
Client (under breath) who’s idea was it to change the contract to move all the externs off-site?
Client2 (whispered) uh, that was Finley’s idea.