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IT skills drain can be stemmed with project-based approach to mentoring & development

In the face of escalating offshore outsourcing by Western countries, Peter O'Connell (below) Chief Executive Officer of IBM-Rational partner Cogenture, makes the case for a new approach to domestic IT skills development.

The inexorable rise of new IT skills sets in countries such as India and China has created an irresistible trend for a degree of overseas technology outsourcing to occur. Usually delivered at a lower cost, these ‘import' solutions have in many cases been effective in bridging short-term skills gaps that exist in our home markets.

However, the longer-term issue for the West is more worrying. Our IT management base is starting to suffer from under investment and our expertise at the developer level is waning. This cannot fail to have a lasting impact upon our wider business efficiency. So what do we do?

Gartner has this year reported that up to a quarter of IT jobs in Western countries will move offshore by 2010 as the global outsourcing trend continues to increase. Some of this outflow will create cost savings and efficiencies at the operational level and ultimately have a positive effect on the bottom line. The question is, how much skill do we want to lose? Is Gartner's prediction of 25 per cent actually more than we should be shedding?

Under investment in corporate technology expertise for the last five years has driven a generation of senior managers out of IT and IT strategy into other professions. The result of this is that Europe and America have both witnessed a skills gap at the IT manager level – and at the same time, the industry has reduced its training of new entrants in their twenties and thirties. Outsourcing to India is all very well but an estimated 52.7% of projects are costing 189% of their original estimates (source: The Standish Group), so it seems clear that we should concentrate a little more on our home skills development and keep a tighter rein on its future growth.

Notice we say growth. We do need to redress the balance here. Offshore outsourcing is set to continue, but a renewed focus on domestic IT skills is imperative if we are to reduce the massively high number of projects that fail due to poor specification or bad implementation. Organisations are now going to have to look long and hard to find people who can bring competitive advantage to bear at affordable prices.

Software development is a core issue

The IT industry's constant need to re-skill its employees is most prevalent at the software development level, where dynamic and competitive business markets create a need for new applications and platforms creating a recurring need for knowledge growth and on-the-job competency to implement bespoke solutions. Focused delivery-driven training and mentoring programmes are the best guarantee for bringing these projects on-line according to target. External experts are often needed to develop new experts in-house. Alongside software development - security projects, wireless developments and legacy systems are similarly under skilled and need increased attention.

According to The Standish Group "Chaos" Report as many as 74 per cent of software projects are over-budget, late or cancelled. These shortfalls are caused by a range of factors including poor enterprise-level management, inappropriate setting of project milestones, a lack of user involvement at the planning stage and the need for clearer project objectives. Industrial strength software development needs an industrial strength approach just as with many other engineering disciplines.

Industry analysts agree that this issue is ready for greater focus. "The IT skills gap is unlikely to improve while the effect of inadequate investment in training in home markets is compounded by the gathering pace of overseas outsourcing. Programming and support staff alike both need more formal mentoring programmes to deliver on-the-job skills efficiently and guarantee skills transfer. Failure to recognise this fact will mean projects continue to come in over budget and below specification," said Duncan Chapple, senior analyst at Octegra.

To make the reality of this situation more difficult, the number of students entering formal IT education in the west is falling by around 10 per cent per year at the moment and according to Gartner (in February 2004) India has 90% of total offshore revenues, although China and Russia are making inroads.

De facto standards

When we look at iterative software development processes such as the de facto standard IBM Rational Unified Process, its flexibility and power means it has to be substantially tailored to meet the specific needs of an organisation. What this means in practice is that a substantial amount of expert advice is needed to ensure the project progresses as planned. However, the right combination of process support and project management will allow effective commercial use of offshore resources whilst maintaining key on-shore resources.

This approach requires IT staff to undertake a structured skills transfer programme using assessments, learning plans, just in time training and delivery focused mentoring to ensure they are properly equipped to deliver projects on schedule and to specification. It also demands staff ‘buy-in' to the training process and are willing to invest time, effort and their own feedback so that they become critically involved in the outcome of the project in hand.

If we equip IT departments with the latest skills that will enable them to become self-sufficient in modern software development tools, the level of outsourcing in software development should dramatically reduce. Delivery-focused training and mentoring programmes are the most effective way to ensure software is delivered accurately while re-skilling the workforce at the same time.

As this self-sufficiency is developed, the IT function is effectively enabled with a ‘grow-your-own' form of internal skills expansion. Senior staff become more adept at rolling out a wider set of skills more effectively, with better understanding and comprehension among the users and at a much faster and therefore better value rate. It is without question a win-win proposition. It just requires planning - and this must come from the top of the organisation.

To build these domestic skills so that they deliver the most value, an organisational assessment should be carried out to establish and measure existing capabilities and skills sets that can be built upon. Once goals are defined, an education programme can be scheduled to correspond with the various stages of the project development cycle.

This is the kind of ramped-up focus we are going to need if we wish to re-establish the level of IT expertise needed for the future. The IT cut backs since 9/11 and the trends for offshore support have the potential to shift us towards a market upset not dissimilar to the dot com bomb era. Offshore operations will eventually become saturated and there could be a shortage of IT capability worldwide. All we are saying is – look at your IT skills and training programme now rather than later.

Knowledge Retention

A pro-active mentoring approach improves knowledge retention by reinforcing training – there is plenty of evidence for how quickly classroom based training is forgotten on return to the workplace. Pro-active mentoring converts training to results, encourages personal growth, bridges competency gaps, develops under-performers, helps overcome learning curves and reduces risk of adopting a new process on live projects.

There will always be a substantial element of IT skills that need to be kept within the home market and refined to be best-in-class at all times. What we are talking about here are skills for people working on high-consequence mission-critical systems such as banking or military applications. If this is the case, these IT professionals will need unmatched IT skill development. Surely, business managers should take the same approach to the knowledge management requirements for their company's IT skill-base. They probably wouldn't put cheap petrol in their cars would they?

Software development in the West has the opportunity to stay on track if it adheres to the reality of the training needs it requires to bring projects in on time, on budget and on spec. It is certainly the case that a mix of on-site and off-site outsourced work will deliver the greatest competitive advantage in the long run.

If we are to ‘control' the amount of outsourcing we adopt, it is now down to the IT industry itself to prove the effectiveness of project-led training and mentoring frameworks. These should feed back into the overall IT strategy, which again should work in concert with a firm's corporate commercial objectives. Then, and only then, is it possible for outsourcing and in-house development to work together well with a clearly defined process and rigid roles in place to guarantee a more accurate outcome.

Those companies that make a success of this proposition will be those that commit from the top and engage their skills transfer programme with every level of the organisation from executives to individual team members. Successful enterprise IT strategies will focus on blended business and IT initiatives. Critical to this are improved software development efficiency and return on investment. At the management level the essential need is for delivery-focused education and at the team level, measurable skills transfer.

Of course we now recognise that IT is a foundation element in an organisation's ability to grow, adapt and operate within its particular market. It may be a bold statement, but a project-focused approach to training and providing its IT staff with the right skills for the enterprise, which clearly reflects the firm's business goals, has become a commercial prerequisite.

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© 2005 Cogenture. Reproduced with permission. Any opinions or views contained in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Training Reference.

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