Kent walked back to his office using his strutting man-in-charge walk. He had power-gripped each of the board member’s hands at the end of the meeting and assured them he had every confidence of this project’s success. He had an entire folder of links to articles from the weekly trade press expounding offshoring as the answer to world hunger and the Utopia of cost cutting. Of course, Kent had to have his assistant Margret find those links and create that folder, but the board didn’t need those details.<\/p>\n
Yes sir, Kent was already picking out his corner office in Mahogany Row. He was going to go from director to president, skipping all of those cumbersome VP roles in between. Kent was going to achieve this feat because Kent had a plan!<\/p>\n
Original ideas didn\u2019t happen much to Kent, at least not good ones. In truth, this wasn\u2019t an original idea, and it wasn\u2019t his, but he was going to claim it. Kent was going to be stuck in this IT role for approximately two years because the bank frowned upon people changing jobs more often than that. He could be \u201coffered\u201d a job through HR as part of a promotion, but he couldn\u2019t apply for one directly before then. You didn\u2019t get \u201coffered\u201d the kind of job Kent wanted unless you ended your tour on an up-swing, and he had an up-swing planned.<\/p>\n
Big Four Consulting assured him that they could migrate a data center every other month as long as there was a maintenance window in that month. They wouldn\u2019t risk moving a data center during the end of a quarter when many additional jobs would need to be run. Moving all four sets of data centers to the new offshore set would take under eighteen months. While the plan would address a massive cost issue, it still wouldn\u2019t address the monumental effort of integrating the various applications so management could have its \u201cworld view\u201d of First Global Bank.<\/p>\n
Kent\u2019s big plan was to completely eliminate the on-shore programming staff. He had called a college friend at General Motors who told him how they had massively reduced their pension liability and direct cash outlay for programming by outsourcing all development to a consulting company that was using programmers in India and paying them ten dollars per day. Of course the consulting company was charging ten dollars per hour for those programmers and pocketing the difference, but that detail didn\u2019t come up. Another detail that didn\u2019t come up was the fact every project of any real size the offshore workers did was a complete failure that had to be hidden in the books. No portion of it could be fixed or salvaged. No matter what country you went to for IT workers, skilled software developers didn\u2019t come cheap. This was an arrangement based on cheap, so they didn\u2019t get skill.<\/p>\n
All Kent had to do to justify getting rid of everyone here, and thus cement his rise straight to a presidency desk, was to eliminate all of the on-shore staff. To do that, he needed a project the board would leap at, thus the \u201cworld view\u201d project became the goose laying the golden eggs in Kent\u2019s eyes. He could enlist Big Four Consulting, which had just gotten the offshoring contract, to put together a spreadsheet with staff hour estimates that were amazingly high for an integration project. Then he would have them put together what the project would cost using their offshore development staff versus the cost of on-shore labor at their standard contracting rates. His staff would of course have to train their own replacements before being shown the door.<\/p>\n
Kent wouldn\u2019t even have to finish the project. He would get the credit for it, and his replacement would have to deliver it. His replacement would have to work at least a year before he could come up with some other cost-cutting measure, and it would all pale compared to the costs Kent had cut. His walk around the company had a very special \u201cI\u2019m the man!\u201d strut today.<\/p>\n
Kathryn, project manager for Big Four Consulting, was ecstatic when she heard the news they had won the contract. All of the schmoozing had paid off big time. She quickly notified the services manager and got the contract drawn up to overnight to Kent for him to sign. Each invoice presented to the bank had to be below a certain dollar amount so Kent could approve it, but they could invoice as often as needed.<\/p>\n
Unlike most projects, they were actually going to do this one instead of just generate paper. They had already contracted with a communications company to provide all of the communications cut-over effort for about a quarter of what was in the contract. A huge data center had been built in Bangalore. While a large amount of networking and communications equipment had been installed, not a lot of computers were there. The contract with First Global Bank would get the ball rolling. All of the mainframe and midrange computers used by that company had excess capacity. A deal would be struck to purchase the largest models available from those computer vendors and get them installed. That done<\/span><\/span>, the firm<\/span><\/span> could sign another deal with another client that used the same equipment and bill them out twice. This was going to be a massively profitable venture!<\/p>\n With the overnight sent out and her phone calls made, Kathryn was dreamily calculating what her commission would be from this project. Judging from the email sent out with commission rates for project managers, she would be pulling in an extra $50K per quarter once this project got moving. Not bad at all.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0
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You are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n