The offshore IT industry comprises of knowledge workers. Usually companies based at geographies with higher labor costs offshore some of their business processes and functions to lower cost offshore destinations. The need to digitize the planet and make humans more efficient coupled with the explosive growth in Internet connectivity and infrastructure led to the birth of the offshore IT services industry. Given the constant supply-demand mismatch that emanates from well performing economies in customer geographies, attrition is a known and generally accepted characteristic of the industry.
Attrition also remains one of the top concerns of clients and prospects, and rightly so since losing key people from an active engagement hurts irrespective of the backup plans and procedures an organization may have in place. Solid delivery environment management frameworks – Cybage’s ExcelShore® is certainly one of them – ensure relatively prompter replacement of resources by instituting a capability based shadow hierarchy while preemptively computing attrition risk of an individual. Process frameworks like CMMi will ensure sufficient documentation and knowledge sharing activities take place on an ongoing basis. Matured HR policies will protect the business’s and clients’ interest by creating an exciting work culture so employees don’t leave, but requiring a certain notice period by the departing employee to ensure adequate time for knowledge transfer.
Still the term ‘tribal knowledge’ does not exist for no reason. In spite of all frameworks, processes, and policies that a matured and efficient organization may have in place, departure of key individuals from a team leads to domain loss, the degree of which can vary based on various parameters including complexity of the project, knowledge worth of the individual, risk mitigation achieved via team composition to name a few. Whatever a company may do to keep its employees happy, good people will still leave leading to bad attrition. Of course, as part of the natural process, there will be some good attrition taking place as well. While good attrition is obviously good (most of the times), too little of bad attrition is not good and here is why. If none of your best people are leaving the organization in an open market, either they might be overpaid for an equivalent job in the industry, or they are less capable relative to what the industry demands. For the organization, retaining its best talent at an optimized cost becomes a balancing act of economical proportions! In spite of whatever an organization can justifiably do, people will leave and the show will also go on.
Data driven approach to manage continuity of US presidency
Arguably, one of the most complex jobs on the planet is that of the President of the United States. This is a scenario where attrition is mostly predictable – a replacement is generally required every four years or eight years. A shadow hierarchy is in place and protocols are well defined for change of authority in case of an untimely replacement need. When the leader of the free world is so predictably replaceable, do we really need to get bogged down and overly concerned when key people in our little world of projects move on? I believe the answer to this question should be an astounding ‘No’, especially if you believe that your organization is doing the best it can do to prevent as well as mitigate attrition risk.