Sourcing++

Are you missing a few pieces in your amazing puzzle building strategy?

We recently met with a large Scandinavian retail group that said: "Our corporate strategy is all set, we all know what to do, the goals are ambitious and we have broken it down for my department and gotten all approvals, even a very generous budget."  

"I engaged our HR department, and gave them clear descriptions of the resources needed and the urgency. A few weeks later we ran into a brick wall. Yes, there are a few talents out there that could match the profile, but they are courted by so many others that salary levels go through the ceiling and their demands overall are not possible to meet within an old-school big organisation as ours."

"I was shocked, even going way above our salary expectations, we could not find the talent we needed. And further more, while searching for new talent, we simultaneously lost some old talent, tracked down be recruiters working for our competition."

One thought would be to look at your existing talents, and even if they do not match your capability matrix for the work in planning, why not involve them and let them re-skill and up-skill? Training is becoming the new trend, and is actually a very rewarding action, it builds knowledge and a sense of belonging that fosters higher retention. One of our Senior Manager has a saying, "Should we know this, is it part of our product DNA? If, yes, then start with learning that", his point being: do not instinctively go looking for an external specialist to do the job for your team, have the team engaged and let them decide from the strategy what knowledge should be in-house.

Back to the Business Manager: "Someone proposed to go outsourcing, but no way I wanted to do that, it means losing control and having to speak another language and lack of control and overall a lot of complications."

Seems you had some bad experiences. This is common, bad experiences from outsourcing are truly many.

Sourcing++ is a way of looking at this from the next level. Focus on the talent you need, disregard everything else for now. Is the talent a fit for your purpose? If yes, let's break down the perceived obstacles.

• Not being physically in the same office
• Not speaking the same native language
• Not sharing any afterwork or coffee breaks physically
• Needs micro-management and constant oversight
• Not sharing the same culture

Removing these obstacles means you go fish in a much bigger talent pool.

Talent is not geographically grown or constrained. Salary levels are still the results of a societal norm based on living conditions that is fed from quality of life return based on taxes. Paolo Alto has attracted global talent and paid them handsomely, which caused cost of living to skyrocket and the city treasure chest filled with possibilities to improve every aspect of living there. Would you take a salary cut, if you moved somewhere less expensive? Probably not, so why would the opposite be true? Many who tried moving somewhere else just for a higher salary, quickly realised that they felt miserable and lacked friends, family and familiar nature.

We are based on the belief that talent should be happy and safe, both physical and mental. Being in your home town, putting that talent to work as part of a team that shares your values, is happiness. You feel safe to explore and continuously stay curious in learning new ways to improve both as a person and client value. Great talent needs to feel safe and to be part of something that makes a difference to the world.

Opportunity

It all comes down to mature steering and governance. If you get that right, it does not matter where your talent is located, the value will keep churning out. Focus on those business crucial areas and you have magically opened up for a work model that will have you grow fast and stable. Going distributed opens up for some gains to be harvested.

• Asynchronous work models remove disturbances and fosters focus
• Transparent, shared documentation eases rotation and onboarding
• Clear strategy opens up for autonomous work ethics
• Actual working products that sell, is the only measure needed
• One common operational language fosters well thought throw directives
• Local onsite talent can focus on tactics and strategy, freed from operations

This is not an entire new insight, just tweaked a bit for the software industry. Think of Apple and Nike, they have all their operational production outsourced far away. Their business strategy and knowledge is still kept and developed locally onsite. They have mastered the way of communicating, steering and governing the operational resource that executes the production of their products.

Why can't you be like Apple?

Sure you can, but humans don't like change, and there is something warm and fuzzy about being able to physically walk over to an onsite team and tell them they are needed to do something. Now, is that really a good thing? Talk to your production operators, and they all will say the same, "no, we don't like being disturbed while working. Feedback the outcome we produce, so we can improve. Restrain from constantly talking to us about ideas and sharing your views on production. We got this, this is what we do."

Being able to do things like Apple, you need to have your strategy and business objective in order. Steering is easy once you have objectives and key results in place (OKR).