Outsourcing is not only a mainstay today, but a large corporation with a wide range of IT applications can have several IT vendors providing AMS (Application Maintenance Support).
Many Indian companies (including the now notorious Satyam) are the providers to MNCs and large corporations around the world, including Singapore.
From time to time, the corporate management decided to shake things up, try to get a better deal or better service by changing, or rotating, AMS vendors.
There was 1 new application that was assigned to be supervised by me last October. The AMS vendor was the same IT vendor which developed the system. The system took nearly a year to develop, and after the warranty ended, we signed up a 1-year AMS contract.
Only last Nov-Dec, I was informed that as part of a large-scale shake up, many applications will be re-assigned to a different AMS vendor, including this new application I was supervising.
The AMS vendor who was stationed onsite to support this application has been quite hardworking, and it fell to me to brief him about the change.
He is an Indian national, and he went back during Deepavali week last year to get engaged. Next month, he's supposed to go back for 2-3 weeks to get married, and then return to Singapore with his bride. He has been staying with some friends, and has been scouting for a new residence to live with his wife.
It was lousy timing of course. Not only my company unable to confirm the transition date, he now has a short notice to tell his bosses about this decision. As a company, they may not have much to complain - though they will lose 1 AMS contract, they gain quite a number of others with my company.
At a personal level though, my vendor staff now has no idea how his company will redeploy him - Singapore, India or elsewhere. More unsettling is there is no fixed schedule when he will actually be relieved from supporting the application. Hence, he cannot tell his wife-to-be where they will located after their wedding.
He told me "It's business.", but I feel really lousy for him. If he was single, it'd be much easier to make the transition, wait for an unfixed schedule to know if and when he will relocate from Singapore. But with a bride in tow now?
Yeah, he should be told personally, but in all professionalism, it should have been communicated formally by my company's IT Procurement department to his company.
Well, that's...business, I suppose. We can't control what happens, only how we react to what has happened. I hope your vendor's staff will get redeployed soon.
ReplyDeleteThe most practical solution is you can fix the problem yourself. There will always be problem relying on someone else because you are not their priority, and morever it's hard to find someone who is willing to sacrifice his own lesiure time to solve your problem.
ReplyDeleteIs there no other vendors that meet your company budget ?
I suspect budget is only 1 of the factor, the other factors being to avoid over-reliance on any particular vendor, as well as "keep them on their toes".
ReplyDeleteThen there's also an re-alignment of LoBs (line of business) ...
Get at least 2 backup vendors.
ReplyDelete