Given the topical theme of the World Cup final, we’ll go with a soccer story today.
For the World Cup final, do you think Argentina ever considered replacing Messi with an attacking midfielder from a local Argentinian club simply because his wages are lower?
Of course they wouldn’t. Not because the local player is useless. Not because every role can/must be filled by a global superstar. But because everyone understands that midfielder-for-midfielder, striker-for-striker, player-for-player does not actually mean like-for-like in any team sport.
Yet many telco outsourcing contracts apply exactly that logic.
Perhaps some execs don’t realise that business is like team sports in many ways.
They assume architect-for-architect means like-for-like – equivalent capability. They assume the same job title means the same likely result. They assume that optimising for a reduction in day rate will not change the outcome or performance of the team.
I’ll let you in on a little secret… It does.
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The best player is not always the oldest player, the longest-serving player or the person with the most impressive title. The most valuable player is the one who can influence the result when it matters.
Elite players are not paid more because they dominate every second of the 90 minutes. The reality is that they run around the pitch for, let’s say, 88 of those minutes doing, more-or-less, the same that a local club player would. For 88 of the 90 minutes there’s almost nothing separating Messi (@~US$500k per week) and the club player (who probably has to pay a registration fee to play).
Why the massive discrepancy?
Well, in a handful of decisive moments, the Mbappes, Messis, Ronaldos, Haalands, etc can see something others cannot see, make a decision others would not make or produce an outcome others simply can’t produce. That outcome is seeing the ball in the back of the net.
People building those leading teams are optimising for trophies won, fans in raptures, stadiums full. They’re not optimising for the lowest possible cost to put a team on the park.
Now, let’s apply the same logic to exceptional OSS practitioners. Or maybe just to telco “teams” more generally.
Their value is not measured only by how many meetings they attend, documents they produce or years they have carried an architect title. That’s the other 88 minutes. Their value appears when a programme reaches a critical decision:
Those moments may be rare. But they can decide the result…. whether the ball reaches the back of the net, or whether you continue to play endless “extra time” periods kicking the ball around because nobody is capable of setting up or converting a goal, or finishing a transformation.
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The problem becomes most dangerous when the people making the selection can’t reliably distinguish Messi from a park player. Or aren’t even incentivised to bother.
That’s often what happens in OSS recruitment and outsourcing. It also often happens during retrenchment periods.
The decision-makers can compare job titles, CV keywords, certification lists and day rates. Those things are much more easily visible. It’s much harder to reveal judgement, pattern recognition, domain depth, delivery influence or the ability to change the trajectory of a complex transformation.
Then what if those decision-makers are only given one overriding instruction / incentive:
Cut costs drastically.
The outcome is predictable. They select the cheapest people who appear to match the role description, because cost is easy to measure whilst impact is not.
This does not mean the selectors are incompetent. It means the system has asked them to optimise the most visible number while giving them no reliable way to assess the thing that matters most.
Over the years, I’ve seen wave after wave of retrenchments within telcos (luckily I’ve never been in a position to be retrenched). In each case, I’ve seen examples where the most talented (the Messis and Mbappes) are happy to take a redundancy package because they know they’re easily employable elsewhere, but this leaves more of the less easily employable “dead wood” behind. It’s akin to chopping off the fruit-bearing limbs and leaving the dead branches behind.
But the bean counters think that’s okay. They still have people remaining in positions with the title of striker, midfielder, winger, etc….
What do you think happens to the performance of the team afterwards?
And what do you think happens to the superstars that remain? Do you think they want to stay with a declining team? How hard would it be to entice Mbappe to come and play for your local team, even if you were able to pay the salary he commands?
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One of the other challenges with outsourcing comes down to tenure in a role. As was indicated above, tenure alone doesn’t turn a 40-year club player into a Haaland.
However, tenure playing alongside familiar colleagues can be vital. I’ve seen this from working with same/similar teams across multiple projects. The more time you spend with them, the better you learn their strengths and weaknesses, capabilities and behavioural traits. The better you gel with them and the more productive the team tends to get.
The other is tenure within an environment. I recently worked on a network resiliency consultancy for a leading T1 telco. All of the members of their major incident management and resiliency improvement teams had 30-40 years experience working for that telco. These “ninjas” had worked with all the networks, all the systems. Knew the estate’s weaknesses. Knew how to diagnose and narrow in on issues never seen before. Knew where the skeletons are buried.
Now, put those same people in a different telco and they’re still highly talented, but will take a while to get up to speed. Moreover, they’ll probably never perform at the same level as they did at the original telco. They just haven’t collected enough local knowledge (dots) to connect the dots like they could at the original employer.
When engaging outsourcing contracts, it’s quite likely that you will get some fantastic A players, often with 10-20-30 years of telco experience. However, it’s also likely that they’ve worked across many different clients. That can be a plus (many different patterns observed), but also a minus (not enough local tenure to understand the environment at a ninja level).
The same telco referenced above has been outsourcing all key roles for the last 10-15 years, often to different outsource partners. What’s the chances that their current 30-40 year veterans will enter retirement soon and be replaced by others with 30-40 (or even 10-20) year tenures with that environment and all its pieces?
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OSS platforms help operate some of the most important machines on the planet.
They support the communications infrastructure used by governments, emergency services, businesses and billions of people. The decisions made by OSS teams affect service availability, network resilience, customer experience, automation / efficiency, fulfilment of requested services, assurance to fix faults (or prevent them) and the ability to introduce new technology.
Telco networks and OSS are the World Cup that runs 24×7, every day of every year.
Yet telcos sometimes assemble the squad responsible for these systems as though they were selecting the cheapest available local club players and then asking them to represent the country in this World Cup.
Not every role requires Messi. A successful team needs a balanced squad and cost is always a factor, even for the richest Man Us and Barces of the world. There is also an important place for efficient delivery, developing talent* and cost discipline.
But when the result depends on a few critical moments, telcos need superstars capable of influencing those moments like nobody else can. Like the ninjas we talk about again here.
Architect-for-architect is no more automatically like-for-like than replacing Ronaldo with me. I can kick a soccer ball. First kicked a ball in primary school. Have won a couple local futsal championships back when I played in my 20s. But how do you think I’d perform on a world stage? (please don’t answer that question!!)
The real question is not whether one person has a lower day rate than another.
It’s whether the organisation can recognise the difference between cost reduction and reducing its chances of winning.
*Speaking of developing talent, have you noticed that there are almost no formal, enduring training programmes remaining in telco anymore? Budgets have been cut so that it’s maybe only a short course here or there. No Ninja Academies. No formal cadetships.
As the old counter-argument goes:
But what if we spend years training them and they leave?
Well, what if you don’t train them and they don’t?
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