The Contract Gets Signed

While my peers and I were executing and expanding our contract with Intelligroup, our upper management was exploring a possible company-wide contract with Accenture. Rumors circulated the office, and everyone was worried about their jobs. Would they remain on the company side of the contract, converted to Accenture on the other side of the contract, or receive an end date as no part of the contract at all? It was a time of little information, and lots of rumors and speculation.

Mass Exodus

With those rumors came uncertainty. The consultants in my group were all told that they were to have stable employment for the next 9 months, and would be given at least 2 months notice if that were to change. That was not enough for some people, especially when they could find more stability in another position. Lots of people decided to start looking right away. I am glad that I had a solid, honest relationship with my team. They recognized that I was keeping them as informed as possible, and they let me know when they were interviewing. We were able to coordinate departure times to minimize impact to our projects, and I appreciated that.

As people left, we did not have enough time to post open positions, interview, and hire good people. We would also have to find people who would then stick around for only 6 months or less. This led us to look for other alternatives, like the Intelligroup contract that we had. We reached out to them, and they were exciting to expand the scope of the contract. We increased the number of resources we had onshore and offshore. Recognizing that training would be difficult offshore, we tried to keep as many people onshore as we did offshore, so that we could continue to pair up resources for each projects. We struggled a bit when we lost Jim Sharp, our Support lead. Intelligroup stepped up and identified a great resource, Gangadar Kotu, who filled both support developer and support lead shoes, and did a really great job when we were in a bad spot. Intelligroup was a huge band-aid over the gaping wound that was our staffing exodus problem, and gave us the ability to keep our projects on target and transition to Accenture.

Other Teams

On my team we did not run into too many difficulties on my team with the mass influx of new resources from Intelligroup. We left the interviewing to Intelligroup, and, we had a resource or two that didn’t meet our expectations. They did not stay around long enough to cause too much of a problem. Other teams had a lot more trouble that we did. They experienced trouble with code quality, accurate estimates, resource performance, source code control, and a host of other difficulties. Although the Intelligroup did pretty good by my team, we all were looking forward to the move to Accenture for different reasons – new staff, formal knowledge transfer, new tools, resource stability, and more structured teams. We all were hoping that we had learned from the Intelligroup experience, and carry that over to our Accenture contract.

I am sure that the folks I worked with on my team, my peers, and their teams, will have lots to add about the Intelligroup contract. I hope they post their comments and share their experiences here.

What Next

In my next post, I will over the Accenture Knowledge Transfer, the Shadow Period, and the High Performance Team kickoff.