Layoffs at an Alarming Rate
Layoffs are happening all around us. One big problem that management tends to overlook when laying off people is that, especially in Notes shops, the people being laid off are the only ones who can perform certain tasks. What happens when the only person who knows the process for deploying changes to a mission critical application is let go?
In order to stay lean and still be able to respond to changes in business, it is critical that you have automated processes in place that reduce the dependency on specialized knowledge. Consider the following areas when looking at how your application environment is managed:
There are usually way more places to save money than blindly laying off key employees. (read more)
In order to stay lean and still be able to respond to changes in business, it is critical that you have automated processes in place that reduce the dependency on specialized knowledge. Consider the following areas when looking at how your application environment is managed:
- What controls the movement of the application from development to production?
- If using contractors, how are you tracking what changes they make to applications?
- Are you sure that all changes are being tracked so the next person can get up to speed quickly?
- How secure is the production environment? Are employees still capable of making changes directly to live applications?
- Do you even know what applications exist or what is being accessed in production? Are you wasting time maintaining under-utilized applications?
There are usually way more places to save money than blindly laying off key employees. (read more)
- Automate manual processes to reduce the number of people required to maintain a system.
- Be proactive! Fixing things takes much more time and money than prevention!
- Keep track of what is changing so people don't spend time repeating past mistakes!
- Reduce the number of applications and servers you have. The computing power you have today is almost surely under-utilized.
Of course it's much easier to look at head count reductions and see potential cost savings. However this doesn't take into account the negative impact to the business that these reductions will have, if not in the short-term, certainly in the long-term. Failure to maintain the knowledge and skills required to maintain mission critical applications will most certainly come back to bite you. It's not really a question of IF this will happen as much as a question of WHEN this will happen
You can't wait for the axe to start falling before you take action. This must start now so that no one picks up the axe in the first place ... at least not for the people responsible for these critical applications!
Category Layoffs
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Posted by David Killingsworth At 03:20:06 AM On 02/12/2009 | - Website - |