James Governor's Monkchips

Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget

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Bex Huff is a bit of a contrarian if this blog entry is anything to go by. Taking on one of Redmonk’s favourite subjects- Top Down vs Bottom up, encouraged by James McGovern, he suggests that outsourcing could be a useful bottom up phenomenon.

There’s nothing wrong with giving your middle managers a budget to outsource. Heck, I see nothing wrong with giving every developer a $5,000k budget, and let them “outsource” some tricky code to another developer who can do it in half the time. Or buy a awesome monitor. As long as there’s modest oversight, and your developers aren’t idiots, there’s very little harm that can be done.”

This kind of thinking is enough to give all kinds of people conniption fits, but if you want your employees to help your customers kick ass (as Shirky or Sierra would put it), you may just have to trust them. Of course procurement managers, CFOs, most CIOs, and their key suppliers (and analyst watchers) are going to dismiss the idea that “lower” level employees could make smart purchasing and management decisions. For RedMonk on the other hand, we take it as read that the grassroots gets things done.

18 comments

  1. More to the second paragraph of your post. I learn early on in my career at what point i started to count. I was sitting in a meeting with my CEO and another visiting C-level executive. The C-level executive asked my CEO how his team was. Being naive and young i thought team must be a moniker for company. Much to my surprise my CEO responded with names of just VPs.

    an invaluable lesson

  2. If I were a developer in a mid-large organization, and they gave me $5,000 in play money I would probably pick a major project that had gone on in my organization. Ie: a CRM implementation or SAP project, and I would outsource it all, or most of it, for the 5k.

    My point? Keep me on and fire the rest of them. 😉

  3. I would send some to the guys working on OpenSolaris’ Project Emancipation. The rest? Get someone to set up a asterix system.

  4. setting up a remote office with live video conferencing

  5. Not every CFO would take that position – there is after all such a thing as discretionary spend in most manager’s budgets. Most CFOs would readily sanction if it meant a re-arranging of the deckchairs. Those that is, who don’t see discretion as an opportunity to cut.

  6. I think this model could definitely work in tech driven startups, but if there is already middle management in place, there will be a lot of resistance from managers to trust developers.

    I’m actually one of the weird ass developers that promotes outsourcing in our firm, because it can make a lot of sense from a business perspective.

    But $5k isn’t going to buy much outsourcing. At less than $20k, I would invest in new hardware, and not trying to hire other developers.

    My shopping list would be:
    + Mac Book Pro
    + 30″ Dell display
    + Ikea galant desk

    Opps over budget.

  7. […] Сверху-вниз или снизу-вверх? –>Очень интересная заметкаeng у Джеймса МакГоверна по архитектуре уровня предприятий. Ещё две ссылки на ту же тему – Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Upeng и Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget […]

  8. […] Очень интересная заметкаeng у Джеймса МакГоверна по архитектуре уровня предприятий. Ещё две ссылки на ту же тему – Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Upeng и Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget […]

  9. I’d like to draw attention to another thing I talked about in that post… the issue of having a genuine shared purpose:

    “This harks back to the age-old question about when to allow employees to take the initiative… unless your employees are bound by a genuine shared purpose, bottom-up initiatives will do more harm than good. In a typical company, you’ll be OK… but in a dysfunctional company — where the only way to get things done is bottom-up — you’re just going to make a big mess.”

    As long as you have oversight to prevent people from outsourcing your competitive advantage, you’ll be fine.

    Naturally, this means you have to first determine what your competitive advantage is…

  10. James – see here my post from about 15th months ago on the involvement of technical folks in decision making.

    http://freeformcomment.blogspot.com/2006/03/are-tech-influencers-being-left-out-in.html

    We actually did a bit of research on the topic too – PDF can be viewed/downloaded here:

    http://www.freeformdynamics.com/pdf/Vendor_Cust_Mar06.pdf

    We are looking at this whole area again at the moment (just literally kicking off a study this week), but I can’t imagine much will have changed.

    Basically, marketing folks, analysts and even execs in the vendor community often quote nonsense about CIOs controlling everything and techies not being important from a decision making perspective.

    Back in the real world …

  11. even though I help clients with a top down transactions I think it is a fantastic model. The more developers realize Porsche outsources 85% of what is in its cars and focused on competitive advatnage design, the less afraid they will be of outsourcing. And they will learn to better monitor the outsourcer – it will be their responsibility not some vendor relationship managers…

    the problem with such a small amount is you push them in to staff augmentation models, not SLA based relationships..

    my big question is why not “outsource” that sourcing decision/process back to IT, procurement etc. There is a good reason why those shared services were setup in the first place…you consolidate spend, get their expertise etc.

    Mature outsourcing is about knowing what to keep and what to let others do…

  12. Some years ago my small startup was acquired by a much larger company. I tried to get my new colleagues to continue using the offshore development firm I was working with, but the idea that someone outside the company could complete certain tasks cheaper/faster was perceived as a threat and not an opportunity.

    I tried to convince the IT director that the ability to manage both on-site and offshore teams would look great on his resume. He’d be building a global empire! But he was more concerned that the CFO would do the math and decide to outsource everything.

    So while employees at some organizations would have a blast with $5K outsourcing budgets, many others would freak out and wonder if they’re asked to find their own replacements.

  13. […] James Governor’s post Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget written in response to Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up from Bex Huff Started me thinking again about top-down […]

  14. That’s a useful level of money as long as the work is easy to specify and isn’t going to have a management overhead.

    For example, converting photoshop mockups to XHTML+CSS is not my strong point as a developer. Commodity shops like http://www.psd2html.com/ and http://csssage.com/ (found just now on a quick google – haven’t used them myself) who can turn this kind of work around without contractual negotiation or management work on my part.

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  16. […] I happened upon this little tidbit on my blog backlog. The unconventional James Governor taking a whack at outsourcing as done from the trenches: James Governor’s Monkchips » Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget […]

  17. […] I happened upon this little tidbit on my blog backlog. The unconventional James Governor taking a whack at outsourcing as done from the trenches: James Governorrsquo;s Monkchips raquo; Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget […]

  18. […] HomeBlog Bottom-up Outsourcing – original post July 27, 2009March 19, 2012 By: admin Filed in: New Folds in the SteelI happened upon this little tidbit on my blog backlog. The unconventional James Governor taking a whack at outsourcing as done from the trenches: James Governor’s Monkchips’ Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget […]

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