that isn't a reason for standards to be lower, they could well be paid less but still be paid (relatively) well in terms of local pay
TSB Upgrade issues
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that isn't a reason for standards to be lower, they could well be paid less but still be paid (relatively) well in terms of local pay
I've had experience of people in India who have dealt with queries much better than UK based staff have more often than not.
India doesn't have worker rights do they? From what I understand if someone doesn't perform they get the sack so they're a lot more dedicated than some of the IT support over here.
Not sure tbh with you.
Not sure about worker's rights, but big players like Cap/IBM etc will have a big pool of offshore resources so if one isn't up to scratch then they can easily find a replacement.
Just to add to @Hades post, a lot of people that make the decisions for external resources will just look at day rate and base their decision on that. Sure, it can work out well if you find a great resource but it can backfire as well when you wonder why your cost saving decision has resulted in a bigger cost further down the line!
Just to add to @Hades post, a lot of people that make the decisions for external resources will just look at day rate and base their decision on that. Sure, it can work out well if you find a great resource but it can backfire as well when you wonder why your cost saving decision has resulted in a bigger cost further down the line!
To add another short sighted impact of development decisions; Often corners are cut in development to meet a deadline. Promises are made to fix issues in "phase B". but phase B is just bug fixes and it gets canned in favour of a new shiny project instead. So the support team end up with forever having to adjust data or hand hold the application in some way to keep it running. Requests to the dev team to address the issues are met with "It's being prioritised against other work" so never done.
Support staff are more expensive than development staff even when paid the same (development costs can be partly offset against tax while operation activities can't be). So support becomes increasingly expensive. Management then try to cut costs by offshoring or moving to a cheaper vendor. Knowledge is then lost and tickets sit in peoples queues either unanswered or with an unsatisfactory answer.
Management then see this happening and ask the development team to help address a large backlog of issues. So development people are diverted to help the support team (both directly to help with issues as a Level 3 team or indirectly with knowledge transfer sessions... again and again as the support team has a high turnover). While the development team are partly helping the support team they can't work on their shiny new development project and this puts deadlines under threat...
...with deadlines under threat the development team de-scopes non-essential functionality from the next release and leaves non-critical bugs in the system too. But this is "OK" because they will fix in "Phase B"...
Soldato
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A lot of banks in general don’t seem to keep up with technology, the Barclaycard app on iOS still doesn’t support the iPhone X screen resolution or biometric unlock and the phone has been out for 6 months.
Yet Tesco bank supported both on day one.
Yet Tesco bank supported both on day one.
Associate
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In my experience (about 10 years ago) its more to do with how long they stay with a company before job hopping to get a big pay rise. Pretty much everyone there would hop every 1-2 years looking for a double digit percentage pay rise. No one stays still long enough to take ownership of issues in code they wrote.
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Maybe the upgrade was rushed in because bonuses depended on it...
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...b0ed4091d252d0#block-5adf1c14e4b0ed4091d252d0
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...b0ed4091d252d0#block-5adf1c14e4b0ed4091d252d0
sounds quite likely, ditto to any external vendors who may have contractual targets to deliver stuff by
Associate
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Lol just went to check on whether it had came back up, and nope still down.
Got one or two rather unhappy friends here who are affected by this, TSB being called everything under the sun.
What a shambles.
The register is now having a go
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/...strates_capacity_of_technological_management/
Also
ooooh what kind of data? Proof of Aliens perhaps, maybe the 2017 presidential election rigging or Hilary's emails?...or did these 400 odd customers see an advanced copy of Infinity War
Got one or two rather unhappy friends here who are affected by this, TSB being called everything under the sun.
What a shambles.
The register is now having a go
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/...strates_capacity_of_technological_management/
Also
ooooh what kind of data? Proof of Aliens perhaps, maybe the 2017 presidential election rigging or Hilary's emails?...or did these 400 odd customers see an advanced copy of Infinity War
I hear you.. Things are slowly changing in the banks, however evergreening the old services is a constant millstone that they will have to break the back of. There's no silver bullet unless you can machine learn the old business logic..
I'm not going to get into the India comments. I have experience across the board of asia, talin, poland, czech, india, usa development centres. All have their plus points and minus points.
I used to be a developer, my degree is in software engineering, .. but there's too many people that think they're experts because they can code up a couple of libraries together or because they read about new technology ignoring the problem itself. Now my days are spent doing organisational alchemy with budgets, people and battling stupidity both in business and in technology.
Soldato
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In my experience having to deal with them the problem is normally the opposite. As soon as they learn anything new they tend to leave and get a better paid job somewhere else (and repeat the process). A company i worked for had offshore teams in the same geographic area as some other companies and it was literally the case that people were cycling around them every time they learnt new things. The problem then is that you don't really have anyone who has been at any place long enough to actually gain the Customer knowledge and the knowledge of the particular systems being worked on ...
As for agile ... it's one of those things which looks good on paper, and I'm sure that if you are a relatively new company who has been able to implement it from day 1 with all your staff bought in then it is probable great ... but the times I've come across it it just hasn't worked, communication has broken down, no one has know who is doing what and what the goals are and everything has descended into chaos, (e.g. mid sprint you get told (or not told) that you need to redesign everything so far for political, not technical reasons, to basically lobotomise the project ... oh and you have to interface into this other system who are using a different sprint pattern and wont be able to think about talking to you for another 6 weeks ... by which time you would have been two sprints further on ...)
that sounds more like a problem of people not actually knowing how to use the process and simply people being incompetent, the sprints are just supposed to be small tasks you can achieve in that time - I'm not saying it is perfect but if no one knows who is doing what despite having say a daily meeting and a board with all the tasks on then there are bigger problems in the organisation than the methodology you're using
I take it your business with a budget can't prioritise and your your business doesn't lead. Happens a lot when you have organisations with multiple operational models layered on top of each other.
Agile does work. It is chaos if there is no prioritisation within the business and the business is not held accountable as owner. However the same is true (but masked in red RAG status and slipping timescales) of programmes and projects.
To often a budget is for a fixed time, promises the earth and boil the ocean but then not deliver. Better if you trickle change rather than attempt once every 3-5 years where you cost cut the knowledge out of the organisation in between.