Shell expected to slash 3,200 IT jobs

The no-speak spokesperson

"I can't confirm the number and I'm loath to comment on any number."

Which seems to be shell-speak for "thats is an extremely accurate number, where the hell did you get it from?". I left Shell after their previous cull, called OVA or Overhead Valuation Analysis. Anyone one could suggest ways of cutting the overheads. Comments such as "Get rid of him, he's useless and I could do his job in my spare time" were positively encouraged.

To all my old friends still at Shell - I feel your pain.

Proactive spin and damage control.

Well, they've got to have some justification for exponential pump price and profit curves. After all, some practices could result in future investigations and even criminal charges.

"Customer gouging? Devious manipulation of the oil market and generally lying our asses off? Definitely not! We fired every last employee below the mega-bonused C-level and the wild profitibility is the result!"

EDS

I work in the offshore industry where we provide real time data for the grown-ups in aberdeen to see what is happening on the rig, not for Shell (but I have done). EDS have this tendency to tinker with things on a Friday afternoon, which inevitably breaks the link from us to our real-time centres. Obviously as soon as the data stops it's our fault, even if it's actually due to changes to the router, that EDS have made which "shouldn't have affected it", that we have absolutely no control over. Yeah thanks, we get a weekend of hassles from people due to something we can't do anything about and the person who made the changes swans off for their weekend off. We then have to battle with them to get the changes, which probably weren't all that important anyway, undone. I feel for my colleagues who do the same as I for Shell soon having to deal with EDS or the like

They're doomed

Eventually they'll discover what every other corporation that's taken this path during the past 8-10 years has already figured out - what ever engineering projects they were working on (IT or otherwise), once outsourced, will take at least three times as long and will require at least three time as many many man hours (read warm bodies) as the same projects would have required if they'd kept the project(s) in-house.

i.e., ultimately, a Net lo$$

You'd think after all this time they'd have bothered to at least look into the experiences of those who've trod this well worn path before them. But no! We're a high-falutin oil company, we don't need to pay any attention to others mistakes!

Sorry Royal Dutch Shell, I can't have any sympathy for you - you took the ID10T's solution on this one.

/gds

Gagh!

Some genius in the upper echelons of manglement at my employers has decided to outsource our helldesk, thereby enhancing shareholder value. To add insult to injury, they brought over some of the new helldesk operatives from India to the UK and the US to learn the ropes, and expected the soon-to-be-redundant to train their replacements!

We predict six months of chaos before:

o the manglement caves in, or

o we lose patience, burn the building down and retrain as lorry drivers

Quality support from Outsourced companies (via the support vendor)

Having worked for two major Unix Vendors in the last 9 years I can vouch for the other side of the coin, what its like picking up service calls from outsourced companies that have absolutley no clue at all and lean on the software vendors to get the jobs done.

In my experience the UK, US, Germans & French guys all get the job done to a fair degree and ring in to say "hey, found a bug" or "where's that patch" or "how do I do this complex thing" and OK, you get some occasional idiots who can't type "ls -l"

Comparing to the standard quality from many outsourcing outfits who ring in and have no Unix experience at all an yet argue the toss on some complex point despite having not got past Unix Fundamentals.

"But Sir, your OS crashed because you force unmounted root, which is not allowed. Resizing root is a complex thing to do and you cannot do it online" followed by the complete blank face (metaphorically) and the follow on response "I don't care about the root resizing now, why did your shitty OS crash, please fix the bug that causes OS crash and stop writing emails that cc my managers and make me look stupid despite the fact I've been told this 7 times"

Another common variation is :

"Hi, write me an action plan to be able to do x, y & z as we are incapable of reading a manual, our manager gave us no training budget so we don't know the basics of products we're proposed to be experts on and by the way, do this now or we manipulate things and ring the Account Manager and play the devil with you. By the way, customise the action plan to my particular needs as I am too stupid to take guidance emails. Please don't make syntax errors or I make it all your fault."

To help matters its always good having it explained to me in best Indian'glish possible. OK, I don't speak Indian either so hats off and all but this is a direct replacement for a UK or US Sys Admin afterall so some native skills are expected.

Of course, fairly spineless support managers @ the aforementioned Unix Vendors don't really help. I think the real picture of how awfull these outsourcing deals really are would be much more apparent if the Unix Vendors sent everyone of those style calls straight to their Professional Services Dept for a quote, leaving the supposed experts in hot water.

Is that fair ? Guess it depends if you view a service contract as a replacement for an Implementation specialist (PS) rather than a problem fixing service.

So Shell, outsource yourself to a greater or lesser degree and then please sneak someone inside the outsourced company, a spy so to speak and confirm for me that while it looks OK from the outside it's all actually held together with bits of string, bluetack, sellotape and some old chewing gum.

Good luck!

I, for one, welcome my new corporate overlord..

As a long term contractor who will stay here during the transition, I'm not particularly worried..

I'd like to clear up one popular misconception, though.. Outsourcing is different to offshoring, in that (for the most part) people who work for or contract to Shell the day before the outsourcing goes through will still have a job/contract the day after, only with a different company. There is some restructuring and job shifting, but employees (at least in the Netherlands) are being taken care of. I hear some other countries, with less employee protection, won't be so lucky. Overall there is a much reduced IT budget for 2008, which has additionally caused hiring to slow down, and people to seek employment elsewhere.

Most contractors in my area don't give a damn, as we're here for the money and the experience, and our knowledge can't be replaced overnight. If we feel our contracts are at risk or the work environment is less interesting or desirable, we will move to the next contract.. nobody need terminate us. :-)

A big problem comes largely with employees, who wanted to work for Shell and now feel betrayed. Many are leaving of their own free will, or joining other parts of the company whenever they have the opportunity. This is where the problem lies, because it is usually the most valuable employees who leave first.

Internally, most people think it's a bad idea to outsource core IT because it is in fact core business on the Exploration and Production side. It's just the higher-ups who want to seem proactive. Things will go smoothly for a while, until the new corporate overlords drive off enough good people, then in 5 years, the rest of the company will have had enough, and we'll in-source again... or (depending on the contracts) the divisions will start building up their own specialist IT teams well before then (leading again to fragmentation and incompatibility, which is what Global IT services were working to eliminate).

Shell's IT company/division is smart enough, at least, to keep some of the talent inside the company, but whether the division of labor between Shell and the new companies will keep inquiring minds satisfied enough to stick around is another question. On the bright side, some of the new firms might get fresh talent from the Shell people. :-)