Tag Archive for ‘Benefits’ at LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

OC Transpo, the transit service of the City of Ottawa, has been on strike since December 10th because they are not happy about what the city is offering in the new contract. Here are some of the details of the offer the union received and rejected:

- Salary increase: 3% retoractive to April 1, 2008, 2% on April 1, 2009, and 2% on April 1, 2010.
- One time payment of $2,000
- Increase uncertified sick leave from six to eight days per year.
- Scheduling: “While we are proposing expansion of mixed odd work to weekdays for operators, we are committing to recovery time between all trips. We are also proposing more straight runs (up to 10 hours) as a means to provide more days off for operators. In order to ensure that concerns raised around the issue of run-cutting are heard, we are offering to pay a representative of ATU 279 to work with us on a full-time basis for the next 18 months. Operators will continue to book their daily work and their seniority rights will be respected.”
- Benefits: Many new and/or improved benefits.

Here’s the kicker… many bus drivers are paid over $100,000 because the overtime is getting abused. The city has made many improvements to their original offer, which keeps being rejected by the union president André Cornelier. André refuses to ask the members to vote on the city’s latest offerering. Meanwhile, many people can’t get to work, have to pay for a taxi every day, walk long distances in bad weather, or are stuck in heavy traffic driving to work. Finally, Labour Minister Rona Ambrose is expected to force a vote on the city’s latest offering.

Here’s an interesting clip of André Cornelier explaining on CTV why he is not asking his members to vote on the offer.

Projects can be partially or completely outsourced. The outsourcing can be done partially or entirely offshore. The most common scenario I usually encounter is when a company outsources a project to a consulting company. The consulting team usually works on-site, and often have several resources located offshore. There seems to be a trend for consultant who used to work on-site, to be allowed to work remotely.

As I pointed out, many EIM/SPM solution vendors and consulting companies will discuss the benefits which can be achieved by outsourcing parts of an Incentive Compensation Management implementation. I agree with these benefits, but there are also many challenges which must be carefully managed to be successful.

Working with an offshore team through a consulting company reduces a lot of the risk; you don’t have to worry about contracts, quality, infrastructure, intellectual properties, etc. Furthermore, consulting companies usually have a good relationship with their offshore arm.

Setting aside all ethical and macro-economics discussions about offshoring, here are some of the main pros and cons.

Main offshoring benefits:

Labor: Skilled labor can be very expensive, but it can especially be very difficult to find. Even a large consulting company may have problems finding an available consultant with the right skill set.

Cost: Offshore locations are usually developing countries where labor is significantly cheaper.

Speed: When a project is well managed, more people usually mean a more aggressive schedule.

Work 24/7: For North-American people, working with a country such as India makes it “easy” to work around the clock.

Some of the challenges to be managed

Communication and language barriers: Most of us have some experience working with team members who are located somewhere else, and have faced communication challenges related to this. Offshoring brings another layer to the communication challenges, a topic to which I will dedicate another article.

Coordination: Because of all the communication challenges, complex coordination activities become even more complex.

Cultures: Each culture have their own principles and values. Not being mindful of cultural differences can lead to big problems.

Cost: Savings could be only marginal, especially with rising labor costs in some countries (especially in India)

Quality: This is a challenge for on-site and offshore team alike. Offshore teams are usually very good at achieving very high quality standards. However, quality is still perceived as a higher risk with offshore teams.

Security: Quality is another concern most companies have, especially when dealing with confidential employment information. There are very secure mechanisms to collaborate, even across continents, but security is a topic which requires particular attention.

Key to Success

In my opinion, the key to successfully leveraging an offshore team is in:

Having a good manager and team leads experienced with offshore projects
Having A good [formalized] communication strategy, “hand-off” mechanism between onshore and offshore teams and processes in place
Having a good understanding of which project components can be tackled “at night” by the offshore team and handed to the onshore team “in the morning”, and vice-versa.

LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

Tag Archive for 'Benefits'

Worst Union Leader in the World and OC Transpo’s Strike

ICM Implementation Offshoring Pros and Cons

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