Summary
We have reviewed four or five sets of resumes from Integrated Office Solutions (IES), interviewed four people and reached the following conclusions:
- The model is not right and/or we are not yet ready for this model
- We were seeking back-fill development resource to cover Nathan, yet find ourselves either 'creating' work we could reasonably outsource without inuring too much management overhead.
- The resource unit is full-time equivalents (FTE), whereas we need a mix of skills spread over one or two ETEs.
- The skill sets we require will change over time, so we need to flexibility than employing (even through IOS) gives.
- The absence of out-year funding makes us wary of training staff over the first six months (during which time we are worse off than if we abandoned the outsourcing) when we might then have to let them go.
- IES are not the right organisation for us
- They have been slow to tune in to the skill set we require and only after three attempts were providing candidates that were suitable.
- IES appear to have little influence over the candidates, maybe because they were sourced through recruitment agents rather than directly. Paul received prompt responses to emails when IES claimed that they couldn't get any reply.
- IES don't have staff that we can utilise today, as they can only support us recruit the people we need.
- Outsourcing could work, given the right conditions:
- The biggest risk is that we have never worked together previously. Maybe we can start outsourcing with people we have previously worked with and mature our ability to package up work and quality assure it using mostly asynchronous methods of communication.
- We need the flexibility to engage differently skilled resources for different work. For example, we need a front-end developer for fixes and improvements to the Angular app, but a technical content person for migrating old/tail sites.
- Making the numbers work by outsourcing development is not easy and requires careful attention to the pay expectations of the staff involved. There are additional costs associated with not being co-located and these need to be factored in.