I’ve been asked what the latest is on Project Skinny, so here’s the “skinny” if you will (har!har!).
For my specific team, all of the vestiges of Project Skinny are gone, except that now we do the same amount of work with a lot less people — 40% less people. ^_^; Being the skilled people we are, we obviously can handle doing more work, though it is sad to see so many people having lost their jobs.
For our brethren around The Company, entire support teams had been wiped out because executives said, “support is support” and didn’t consider account eccentricities. Oddly enough, support people who’d never worked account “X” or “Y” were suddenly thrown into situations were they knew the basics, but not the specifics of the account. So, The Company was suddenly forced to try to hire back many of the people they’d previously given the boot to.
And, it wasn’t just support teams that experienced this. Some of the other Ops teams found their numbers cut to ridiculous levels, so much so that some people are working some serious overtime hours. The Company was then forced to try to bring back some people they let go, especially after some things were missed do to the shortage of staff, resulting in The Company paying some hefty SLA penalties and a threat by some customers to pull their accounts.
Pure quality.
Yeah, you got to love executives who seem to think that an idea that works in the manufacturing industry will work on the IT/IS field (with their modifications designed to get rid of as many people as possible to make the stock price go up). We have way to many variables to be placed into a mold. Some days will be quite and some days will have us busier than busy. In the end, the executives will still have their huge bonuses for the fine job they’ve done, while The Company actually is in worse condition than ever. It really is a shame.