Contractors - the forgotten learning curve

As with most big organisations, we have a large number of contractors. Officially, we do this to 'flex' our capability, increasing the headcount with contractors to meet demand over peak periods and releasing them when demand is low. With a lot of those contracts soon to expire, we are once again having to carefully consider whom to renew and for how long. Obviously we need projects on the workstack to justify - and pay for - these people. The problem is that there is currently not sufficient authorised work to justify keeping them on. This is a deficiency in the planning process, as by the time we DO get authorisation to build the teams for these projects, we will already have let some of our people go, and will need to get others in to replace them.

Contractors are generally viewed by HR and senior management as just 'pluggable' resources. Expendable people who can be acquired and discarded at two weeks notice for whatever task we need. The truth is quite different. The reality is that some of these contractors are a lot better than any of the permanent employees, and their knowledge and skills become very valuable. We have accumulated a number of such people who have been here a number of years; the best are usually renewed ad infinitum..

Current thinking does not take into account the knowledge of the applications that the contractors have built up during their time here. While the hard skills of design, coding and testing can easily be replaced, knowledge of how your applications work cannot. The learning curve required to get a new contractor up to 100% productivity can take anything from a few weeks to a number of months, depending on the size and complexity of your systems. No-one factors that into their resourcing models.