Recall the Augmented Reality Exercise System (ARES) scenario: Scott Essex sat at
ID: 398445 • Letter: R
Question
Recall the Augmented Reality Exercise System (ARES) scenario: Scott Essex sat at his desk looking through the roster of employees he managed. As he flipped through the pages, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. Upper management had directed him to cut his team of software developers by nearly 75 percent. This directive came as a result of a recent initiative to reduce costs by outsourcing IT department projects. As he flipped back and forth between the pages, Scott didn't know how to identify which employees to retain and which employees to let go. All the employees brought value to the team—if they didn't, Scott wouldn't have hired them in the first place.
Scott flipped to the beginning of the roster and started putting stars next to the names of employees he would consider letting go. Some had worked for the company for many years. But, in spite of their time on the job, they honestly didn't add as much value as they should relative to their pay. Conversely, there were more recent hires who had tremendous potential and were low-cost relative to other employees. Scott paused and looked up from the roster—he wasn't sure how he was going to look these people in the eye when he told them the bad news. But he would have to do it. It was part of his job.
Then it got worse. Scott's boss sent him a portfolio of new development projects that had to be completed in the next 3 to 6 months. How could upper management expect the usual turnaround time for these projects when 75 percent of his staff was going to be replaced with new outsourced employees—working on the other side of the planet? These new employees would know nothing about the "vibe" of his team or the intangibles that made the team run smoothly. Letting employees go was one thing. But if he didn't get these projects completed on time, his own position could be in jeopardy.
As the manager of this project, would you approve the decision to use an offshore contractor to outsource the development of AR headset applications? Why, or why not?
Explanation / Answer
As a manager of the project my responsibilities will be to complete the project within time and within budget. The key to understand here is that can these conditions be satisfied using the outsourced team? If yes, then I should be onboard with the plan to outsource the project.
The impact of globalization is that the businesses are more competitive and the projects are often dealt with an international approach. This means that teams are spread across international territories to take advantage of cost effective resources, manufacturing cost is often put through a thorough cost-benefit analysis and the organizations often work as a global organization.
It is painful as a manager to see most of the team members being laid off in such circumstances but often we need to think about utilitarian approach here. Is it better to be out of business and see 100% of the current workforce out of job or to let go of 75% of the staff gone and save the jobs of the 25% of the workforce? The logical answer is the latter even though there are temporary challenges to be faced.
The challenges in this situation will be that the new team across the globe will likely not be familiar with our work culture and will take some time getting used to. However, if we have strong processes in place and standard work procedures (example - waterfall, agile methodologies) then the quantifiable metrics (budget, timeline) can be adhered to. The quality of the work will something that may be variable and may cause some confusions, but it can be ironed out in the next iterations. There are also questions of intellectual properties and these can often be tackled using NDA (non-disclosure agreements).
Hence considering the business aspect of the project, I would approve the development of AR headset applications to an offshore contractor. However, I would keep a close eye for the first few iterations of the application development project.
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