Outsource the Work, Not the Leadership
Great article from Harvard Business Review.
Poor outsourcing of I.T., especially in software, can lead to really bad results. Outsourcing the technical part of a project is one thing, as technical skills can be learned and replicated, but outsourcing leadership and creativity though, is a very different game.
One important thing to mention though, is that keeping leadership and creativity inside your business doesn’t necessarily translate in a successful project: you can have leadership problems inside your very own business.
Outsourcing your leadership is by itself, a leadership problem.
When outsourcing, you can’t manage through the contract, you have to manage through the people. Delegating to a vendor is no different, on a day-by-day basis, than delegating internally. You have to stay close in the beginning to ensure that objectives and success measurements are well understood, the approach makes sense, accountabilities and roles are clarified and the team jells. Then you have to stay close enough throughout the project to see what others aren’t seeing, catalyze the right conversations, and ensure that the right mid-course corrections occur.
In the project above, internal leadership believed that their work was done when the vendor walked in the door. They assumed that the vendor knew what they didn’t know — about how the business and IT operated, the legacy systems, the packaged software, and the new technology platforms. And they were completely dumbfounded when the users revolted against the software.
When internal leaders outsourced the work, they made the mistake of outsourcing the leadership of the work as well.
This is a common outsourcing fallacy, but a crucial one to recognize, because it has led many to believe that there’s little need for senior leadership expertise within IT. That is, since IT is outsourced, leadership can be, too. While it’s true that IT organizations that operate with an extensive network of outsourcing relationships have fewer employees, those that remain have to be much more sophisticated in their ability to exert indirect — versus direct — influence.
Read more at blogs.hbr.org
