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.

Communicating with staff

Apparently, UK companies are generally not very good at communicating with their junior employees. Gee, now there's a surprise.

Even in my company, where senior management have made a serious attempt to improve communications, morale and staff engagement, there is room for improvement.

There are a number of factors that help or hinder the process:

• Is communications one-way or is there a forum for staff to generate ideas?
• Are those ideas considered by senior managemet and the good ones implemented! Only if staff believe that their contributions have a chance of making a difference will they feel encouraged to contribute in the first place.
• Are ideas filtered or prioritised? If so, how? I once participated in a session in which some really good ideas came up, but were discarded by the facilitator, because in his opinion they were either too costly, or would take too long to implement. There was pressure on him to select only a few ideas out of the many that were generated, and he selected the ones that were easiest to implement, not the ones that would generate the most benefit. It is important that contributors feel that their ideas are getting a fair hearing, and discarded only because someone else has a better idea.

I have posted before - my God, was that really all the way back in July? - about Workout as a tool for process improvement. It has its uses, but only for specific purposes, and there are better ways of improving things on a larger scale. About which, more another time.

Have a good weekend everyone.