IBM
Employees Speak
Out:
IBM/Xcel
Energy account workers outsourced,
offshored and terminated.
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details
Two of the mission-critical teams inside of Application
Hosting Services announced that they are being BACKED OUT of the Global Delivery
Framework (GDF).
* Division 07 -- Strategic Outsourcing Delivery [Formerly
Integrated Technology Delivery (ITD)]
* Server Systems Operations
* Application Hosting Services
* Real-Time Collaboration Services: Sametime,
e-Meetings, LotusLive, MeetingCenter
* Web Middleware Enablement (Web Hosting): Common Services, Infrastructure,
and Front-End Engineering
When these teams were first
"invited" to join the Boulder GDF, everyone on these teams (including
the first few layers of management) warned that the highly specialized work
these teams do, would not fit into the GDF model.
Those warnings were ignored, and the GDF model was forced onto these teams.
Over the past three years, there's been a huge problem with attrition. IBM
lost the majority of the talented, high-performing, very highly-experienced
personnel on these teams. The cost of that has manifested itself via Extreme
backlogs in project work 40 to 100 percent overtime for personnel on these
teams.
IBM regulars are all salaried and were given no compensation for all of the
extra time they had to work. Sub-Contractors are paid hourly and were very
strictly limited to a maximum of 40 hours per week and were only granted exceptions
to work overtime in very rare occasions.
An internal hosting environment that was becoming increasingly unstable
due to the extreme burden which had been placed on personnel.
The restriction that GDF imposed which stated that any personnel on these
teams must physically be on site in Boulder daily, made it so that any candidates
which may have been considering joining IBM to backfill openings from attrition
were not interested. Nobody in their right mind wants to move to Boulder as
a sub-contractor, work in a sweatshop-type environment and be drastically
under-compensated compared to market salaries. It's unclear still whether
or not these teams will now be granted sufficient staffing to handle the workload.
Even if staffing levels are increased, it is highly unlikely that it will
be done with IBMers instead of sub-contractors.
Until now, IBM had never reversed a decision to move a team into GDF, even
when it was very clearly evident that the model did not fit and was breaking
the business. This decision to back out these two mission-critical teams validates
what any sound-minded individual already knew to be true; the GDF model is
not the end-all be-all magic wand that it was touted as at it's inception.
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