As most of you know, I work for a fortune 500 company, Hartford Financial Services (The Hartford). Now, my company, has been in business for close to 200 years. They have been stable throughout and in all honesty are one of the employee friendly corporate structures in the USA today. We have close to 30,000 employees with 13,000 of them residing in Connecticut (Headquarters).
With the new structure of outsourcing, the company, stood off as long as possible on delegating this to outside vendors. This week, my company had a small layoff of IT professionals (146 people) only to be replaced by outsourced individuals. Now what gets me is that the folks that were effected by this layoff have 60 days to secure a job within the company or else their serverance package starts (2 weeks for every year with the company). Now within the 60 days, they have to TRAIN the newly hired outsourced individual on what they did each and everyday. Most of these people have been here for 20-30 years and were maintenance for our legacy policy writing systems. Now out of the 146 people that were laid off, only 2 remain that were not managers, 40 more of people whom were managers are still managers, meaning, they still have their job. So currently, we have 2 people doing 146 peoples job, and those two people have a management staff that they report up to at 40.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that I understand that outsourcing is how the IT industry is going, however, the way that it is implemented certainly doesn't make any sense. I was not effected by this as my project would have erased half of these jobs anyways since the maintence of the system we are releasing over the next 5 years is vendor maintained, however, it impedes on our CBA and takes funding away from my project. It also could have alleviated this mass layoff for this specific area for another few years and we could have had the opportunity to communicate this to those that were effected in a more professional manor.
Just ranting about being involved in corporate life. Thankfully, my experience is with both Business and IT, as I am an IT Project Manager communicating on the Business Side of the project.
Cheers to job security (at least for another 5 years).
With the new structure of outsourcing, the company, stood off as long as possible on delegating this to outside vendors. This week, my company had a small layoff of IT professionals (146 people) only to be replaced by outsourced individuals. Now what gets me is that the folks that were effected by this layoff have 60 days to secure a job within the company or else their serverance package starts (2 weeks for every year with the company). Now within the 60 days, they have to TRAIN the newly hired outsourced individual on what they did each and everyday. Most of these people have been here for 20-30 years and were maintenance for our legacy policy writing systems. Now out of the 146 people that were laid off, only 2 remain that were not managers, 40 more of people whom were managers are still managers, meaning, they still have their job. So currently, we have 2 people doing 146 peoples job, and those two people have a management staff that they report up to at 40.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that I understand that outsourcing is how the IT industry is going, however, the way that it is implemented certainly doesn't make any sense. I was not effected by this as my project would have erased half of these jobs anyways since the maintence of the system we are releasing over the next 5 years is vendor maintained, however, it impedes on our CBA and takes funding away from my project. It also could have alleviated this mass layoff for this specific area for another few years and we could have had the opportunity to communicate this to those that were effected in a more professional manor.
Just ranting about being involved in corporate life. Thankfully, my experience is with both Business and IT, as I am an IT Project Manager communicating on the Business Side of the project.
Cheers to job security (at least for another 5 years).