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Introduction
When you inoculate
yourself against a disease, you take a small portion of it to prompt your immune
system to fight that disease. In an era of rampant
O-Os —Offshore Outsourcing of professional careers — you can
inoculate yourself to fend off or recover from the effects of this raging
disease.
Today, the O-Os are escalating. The reason: others are positioning or packaging their value proposition better than you are, showing how they can do your work at least 3x more cheaply than you can due to some combination of lower cost, higher skills, and better management.
At ProjectExperts® we believe that well-practiced Project Management is key to inoculating yourself against the O-Os. Why? Because it can easily triple your effectiveness, making an ounce of prevention or intervention worth a kilogram of cure.
This article explores how Project Managers, Team Members and Managers can package and position ourselves to prevent or cure outsourcing fever by focusing on specific skills. By doing so, you should be able to show at least the 3x improvement that your competition does, and more.
Target Audience: This article is relevant for Managers, Project Managers, Information Technology professionals and other professionals in the USA including technical writers, and engineers, who are concerned about career survival in a world of offshore outsourcing.
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O-O Background and Your Diagnosis
For white-collar workers, the O-Os first appeared in the 1960s with offshore outsourcing of data entry. That was followed by outsourcing of systems support and then systems development, some domestically and some abroad. Now most of the other white-collar disciplines, from tech writing to engineering have caught the disease or are about to.
A recent news story in New England asserted that the state agency that was responsible for employment was outsourcing its information systems development and maintenance to a company on another continent. That state has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates in information systems developers.
And a major US automobile manufacturer outsourced much of its skilled labor in the same way, prompting some unemployed in that company’s home state to ask them: “Who do you expect to be able to buy your cars?”
In an era where the official unemployment rate is 7%, your peer group is experiencing 20-25% unemployment or underemployment if you include those who have given up or taken significant pay cuts to just bring in a check. Worse: these lost jobs will never come back.
So how do you cure this raging disease of the O-Os, offshore outsourcing of your jobs? First, determine if you are already immune to the O-O disease. If so, you need not continue with this article. However, keep it close by, because the virulence of O-O seems to increase with time. If you’ve been exposed, don’t waste time; begin your emergency procedures or interventions now.
Diagnosis: Temporarily Inoculated or Exposed?
To diagnose your current O-O condition, take the following short exam. For each question, circle Y for Yes or N for No.
Y N 1. Is your industry a high-margin one, or a high-profile government
agency?
Y N 2. Is your company one of the top two in your market in both share and
growth?
Y N 3. Does your workgroup generate revenue, or provide support to those
who do?
Y N 4. Can you prove you add value (vs. overhead) to your enterprise?
Y N 5. Are you out of work or about to be?
Y N 6. Is your enterprise in the process of shrinking by more than 10%?
Y N 7. Is your workgroup viewed as overhead, or is it revenue-generating?
Y N 8. Have you been asked to map your work processes or document your
procedures for a company-external audience?
If you confidently answered “Yes” to questions 1-4 and “No” to questions 5-8, then you are inoculated for now. However, you still cannot ignore the O-O threat; you just have more time to act.
If you answered, “No” to any of the questions 1-4, “Yes” to any of the questions 5-8, or left some questions unanswered, then you’ve already been exposed to the O-Os or exposure is imminent. You need to apply emergency procedures stat (that’s emergency room jargon for “fast”).
