As T becomes nothing more than an aggregator of services outsourced to the lowest bidder, I thought we could talk about instances where outsourcing was a disaster.
Here's a couple.
- There is a program in T Business Solutions to outsource contracting and other pre-sales work. It is called Project Pegasus. Tech Mahindra got the contract. I don't recall the exact figure but it was tens of millions of dollars (maybe over $100M), and of course many employees were laid off as the work shifted to TechM. Well, TechM resources were so incompetent that the program basically imploded. The remaining T workers wound up picking up the slack. But a contract is a contract, and T was left on the hook to pay TechM for all the work not performed. As a result, the "leadership" sent out a spreadsheet throughout the organization. The spreadsheet listed literally hundreds of individual Tech M. workers, by title, who were sitting completely idle. They were basically begging business units to try to find work for these people. Of course the "asterisk" on the deal was that the business units themselves would have to come up with the money themselves (in other words, Project Pegasus didn't want to pay for them, even though they were paying them ANYWAY). As a result, nobody jumped at the chance to hire an incompetent offshore workers, and Project Pegasus is paying for hundreds of people they don't need. Oh, and the work isn't getting done.
- This was some time ago. There was a huge backlog in deploying services such as SD-WAN and VPN in Asia. The reason was that T didn't have a process to save and re-use customer premise knowledge. Thus, when a new or changed service was ordered, engineers had to go back to the site and re-evaluate it from the ground up. This meant that lead times were many months, which was alienating customers. T hired Tech Mahindra to perform the engineering work en masse, surveying all customer premises and meticulously keeping records. And, it actually worked. Lead times went to a couple weeks from many months. Then, the contract was about to expire, and T was going to bid Tech Mahindra adieu, thanking them for their service. "May we have those engineering drawings now?" T asked. "Look at the contract," Tech Mahindra said. Yep, some mo–n at T gave TechM complete ownership of all of the engineering work that they did over the course of those years. T had to spend tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars purchasing back from TechM what they should have owned from the beginning.
Those are just two..there are many more. Who else has an outsourcing horror story?