Reorganisation

I work for an agency, placed at another company as an IT consultant. The firm to which I am outsourced is reorganising the application development team, to split it into separate teams for support and development. We've been through this before about 5 or 6 years ago, and then they changed it all back again, and now we are having another go at it. These things go in cycles, everyone knows that.

In theory, the reasons for doing this are pretty clear. They think that the that the Production Support costs are way too high and they want to save money. They believe that a lot of not very well justified development work is being done using Production Support (PS) budget. In that regard, they are absolutely right in my experience. The idea of the change is that the PS people won't be able to touch any code at all, and the Development people won't be able to work on anything unless it is properly approved and budgeted. So PS costs will be contained and development project costs will be controlled.

All well and good, but, as someone said to me recently, the people who make these decisions often seem to have no real idea of how the work is actually done.

I can't help feeling that it will be the same as last time. Without being involved in the development the PS people won't really have a clear understanding of what they are supporting and, since they can't change any code, even when they do identify a problem, it will take ages to get it fixed. The Development people will be working under a very tight budget, so they'll have to cut out all the work they can, and the first to go will be things like proper peer review, testing, documentation and so on. Not out of sloppiness or a lack of professionalism, just by force of circumstance. They'll probably have to pass hastily completed, mostly-working, largely undocumented applications over the fence to the PS team and move on to something else (or, more likely, get released).

In defence of the decision-makers, this time there does seeem to have been more thought put into how the two teams will interact and work together . And I expect that most of the people at the coal-face, will do everything they can to make things work. Nevertheless, in my opinion, this looks like a recipe for disaster.

Personally, I'm still waiting to hear if I will be doing support or development in the future (the deadline for informing us is tomorrow). Almost all my work now is development, but I do it all on the PS budget. So who knows. A colleague, who is in a similar situation, was bitterly disappointed to find out he will have to carry on working for our current boss, doing only support. I have a feeling it's a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. Doing only support and no development could be awful, but at least its a job. On the other hand, there may just not be any funding for development work. After all, this is more or less the cost saving they were aiming for in the first place. So the prized devevlopment job could just be a short-cut to unemployment.