[LINK] Gershon recommendations adopted

[Rick Welykochy]

Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:

> The cycle has been broken and can't be fixed. The lessons that should be 
> learned cannot be learned. More mistakes will be made but the people 
> responsible have moved on.

In the medium and long term, the lessons should be learned. Should be. Hmmmm.

This is yet another example of the fallout that is recurring from
a decade of economic rationalisation.

In this case, the lesson is that outsourcing is not a panacea and it
takes some very talented management and liaising to benefit from the
practice.

I have always been a champion for keeping skills, knowledge and corporate
memory in house. Any other approach seems doomed to failure, imnsho.

Anecdote: I recall an approx $200 K outsource project involving one sys
programmer and four accountants from "one of those" consulting firms.
They moved into the desks beside me at my perm job. Months later they
produced a *single* XML application. And it was crap. And it was shelved
and never used. A couple of us FOSS programmers could have completed the
XML job on Linux in under a week. But the result was a failed project and
the corporate knowledge being take with the consulting firm at the end of
the project. Our collective heads were shaking as a result, mainly from
astonishment. It was demoralising knowing the dollar value of the contract
and watching all that money go down the gurgler for no apparent reason.


cheers
rickw



-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Tis the dream of each programmer before his life is done,
To write three lines of APL and make the damn thing run.