So, BPO (or Business Process Outsourcing to give it it's full title). Seeing as that's what I'm doing on this contract here's the Reluctant Contractor's guide to BPO:

1) Take a large organisation that has its own departments and middle management. This can be an IT department but could really be anything. In this particular public sector case study (which bears no relation whatsoever to a certain Borough Council in the north east) this includes all IT systems and development, plus this organisation's call centre and counter staff for customer facing interactions.

2) Note that the vast majority of the staff of this organisation will have been employed for many years there, and all the managers (without exception) have their positions due to dead-mans-shoes and the promote-to-your-level-of-incompetence method. Make up a really stupid name for your BPO company.

3) Offer the organisation a quote for providing all of the above mentioned services, taking special care to make sure the quote is at a level several million below what the organisation currently spends to deliver the same services - plus offer to move all the existing members of staff over to your company while promising no job cuts or redundancies.

4) Justify size of quote by also providing a similar quote to several other such organisations and mentioning the words 'cost savings through consolidation of areas of overlap'.

5) Look smug.

6) Get paid several dozen million to provide these services from each organisation.

7) Singularly fail to improve delivery of any of the services but justify your Porsche in the car park by replacing the few juniors with minimum wage McDonald's University graduates.

8) Blame lack of promised delivery on a) the unions, b) the change process and c) unusually warm weather for the time of year.

9) Move all long-standing public sector workers over to your new BPO company while stripping them of all their long holiday requirements, pension entitlements, flexible working practices and any union representation.

10) Make redundant or sack any transferred member of staff that won't sign the new terms and conditions.

11) Replace with more McDonald's University graduates.

12) Buy second Porsche.

13) Middle managers (who have clung on to their positions with a barnacle-esque approach to survival) who have been transferred will still be incompetent, so simply hire a few seagull managers (i.e. one who flies in, flaps about, craps on everything and flies away again) to cover all the organisations you've BPO'd and wait until the old managers start to quit in disgust/get shown for what they are and dismissed/get sectioned.

14) Hire slightly more competent private sector middle managers for less money and replace on a 2 old for 1 new basis.

15) Buy yacht.

16) Fail to deliver improvements to services again, and in many cases actually allow them to deteriorate.

17) Make up for this by hiring lots of contractors to help deliver critical (i.e. all of them) projects on time. Wonder why the threadbare management team are unable to control lots of contractors and why the project still won't be delivered on time.

18) Make lots of contractors happy by offering them extensions, even though there's only more work to be done because the same contractors aren't working hard enough as it is.

19) Wonder why there are so many Porsches in the car park.


I don't have a Porsche by the way - that's just a case study. I drive an Alfa.... :)