Abhijit Athavale's Blog

Continuing my series of posts on outsourcing, here's the one on managing attrition. Attrition is a fact of life - employees leave a company after a while. In a market as crazy as this one, attrition is probably the second biggest challenge after talent shortage. Attrition is even more problematic for services companies as they generally pay less to maintain lower cost structures. Smaller services companies simply cannot hire resources in places such as the SF bay area. Despite this, you may have found that your outsourcing partner always has the people you need at the time you need. How do they do it? They use a very creative talent management solution - for every experienced engineer they place, one or more resources are shadowing their senior colleagues. These shadows are fresh out of college engineers that are getting trained on the job. Once the shadow is well trained, he/she can be used either to replace an engineer that just left the company, or on another project. This appro...

Looking to getting started with outsourcing? Here is an attempt at demystifying the (4 ½ ) engagement models you will run into: ▣ Staff augmentation - you get the bodies you need. Interview candidates and select them. Once they join, you pay in $ per month. If resources leave, the partner offers replacements. ▣ Staff augmentation with deliverable ownership (aka out-tasking) - your partner takes ownership of milestones and assigns an experienced delivery manager to ensure schedule + quality. You pay for this additional resource, but buy peace of mind. Rates are $ per month. ▣ Project based outsourcing - your partner owns the whole project and delivers it on time and schedule. You work with a delivery/program manager to track progress. The partner may make a fixed or a not to exceed cost bid if the deliverable is well scoped out, else it will be T&M in $ per month. ▣ Complete outsourced product development - this is similar to #2 above, but here your partner starts with the requireme...