I have been getting an inside look at what it takes to prepare to negotiate an outsourcing contract. It's not pretty. The amount of work necessary to gather all of the required data to prepare an RFP in an organization that spread all over the world is unbelievable. Trying to make sense of it all once you get it is even more difficult. Transforming what you have gathered into something that makes sense to someone else once it makes sense to you guarantees that you’ve got the majority of it wrong. As you can see, a fair amount of subjective interpretation is going on in the various stages. Missing from what I have just described is underpinning requirements gathering; the most daunting task of all. It’s easy to paint a picture of infrastructure with Visio, but trying to explain the underlying requirements in words is much more difficult. The requirements that drove some part of the infrastructure may not even exist anymore. The real purpose of outsourcing is making sense of the mess we have made over the years in order to justify the cost of operations.
I've got a ton of new life changes coming this summer. The first came last week when my wife stopped working to be home with our daughter. This is a much welcomed change. There are many more to come.
