The Unite union (of the let’s screw BA travellers for several weeks every few months fame) created a
Facebook group to stop jobs in the technology department being outsourced and offshored at Guardian News Media Ltd, publisher of the Guardian, the Observer and guardian.co.uk. According to the group web site, the board of Guardian News Media is meeting tomorrow to make a decision on outsourcing a large part of their IT department.
Without taking a position on who’s right or wrong in this case, I’m very interested in how this whole thing is going to play out. A recent major rewrite of their flagship web site is one of the most publicised apparently successful IT projects in the UK.
Amazon uses them as a case study for cloud computing.
Phil Willis spoke at several conferences, including Qcon London last year, on how applying domain driven design on this project helped domain experts to get involved in software development, and how they maintained a deep, malleable domain model, whilst meeting deadlines. This is one of the key case studies used by the Domain Driven Design community to prove that DDD works.
ThoughtWorks use them as a reference of how they help big companies implement agile processes. On the back of that project, they got to do the same with AutoTrader, ran by a Guardian subsidiary Trader Media. Their web site quotes Tom Turcan, General Manager for Digital: “A multi-million pound project running on time, and absorbing growth in scope – remarkable”.
A common thread here is that DDD, clouds, agile apparently gave better service more efficiently and produced more business value for the same investment. If the Guardian News Media board is now thinking of pulling the plug on all that, then that is seriously casting a shadow on those claims. Cloud computing aside, both Domain Driven Design and Agile development rely heavily on on-site close collaboration of business users and IT development teams. I guess a multi-million pound project running on time, and absorbing growth in scope, is less remarkable than the money they expect to save by sending the jobs abroad. Or maybe this is a confirmation that their new web site runs on its own and doesn’t need that many people to maintain it.
Update (2:30 PM) The Register picked up the story this morning as well
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Sadly this type of thing happens often. A large company will have a fraction within it help adopt agile and other best practices and have clearly successful results but then upper management decides on some course of action under the impression that it will save the company money.
In the long run the results are pretty disastrous and wind up costing the company a buttload of money and incurs an astronomical technical debt.
Interesting situation. I fear it will turn out so, that a large fraction of the IT department will be outsourced (usually to a company in a country far, far away), and numbers will make that decision sound reasonable for a short-time period. Long-term effects will be negative, but then it’s too late for the employees and also could possibly not anymore attributed to the outsourcing act but some other circumstances
I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Andreas