Sunfish
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 3,412
I have asked repeatedly if QF maintains the in house engineering expertise to understand what is happening to its engines and thus be proactive as opposed to reactive.
As a member of the management team of one of Australias first outsourcing companies involved in the IT industry, I know that one of he first moves we made is to "lobotomise" the customer so that no one within the customer organisation remains with the technical experience capable of taking issue with, or criticise, our service at all.
We did this first by the simple means of hiring away the best brains in the customer organisation. Secondly, we argued for the customer to retrench or fire any remaining technical staff on the basis that they were superfluous.
Finally we went to the manager who had made the outsourcing decision and told them in no uncertain terms that allowing potential technical "troublemakers" to remain in his organisation risked compromising the "success" of the outsourcing program by perhaps calling into question the wisdom of his outsourcing decision, with the obvious implication that if he relied totally on us, we would keep his career safe.
We used very well dressed, very smooth talking and intelligent people to convey this message and it succeeded every time. Hundreds were retrenched at our suggestion in many organisations, leaving them totally reliant on us for technical input, and thus immune from criticism. We produced brightly coloured reports every month that showed how well we were complying with contract performance requirements too.
It generally took about Five years before the organisation realised that they had lost operational control of a core capability that was now affecting their strategic business plans. They then had to begin the long, expensive and difficult task of building technical capability again, then prising our greasy little fingers off their computers.
What happened to the staff of the now closed Qantas RR centre of excellence?
To put it another way, in Five years time Qantas decides it wants to start a service to "Buttistan" in central Asia, and the airport is 4000 ft high and summer temperatures are 37C. Qantas then has to go cap in hand to RR regarding the thrust limits on the engines, and therefore its payload. In other words, RR now has a say in QF operational decisions. Am I being far fetched?
Sunfish's comment above is perhaps one of the most succinct and challenging comments I have ever read on PPRuNe. It is most chilling when one considers its depth and the far reaching consequences yet to be realized as a direct result of strategic decisions taken by inept (should I say ****wit?) CEO s and seniors Management at Qantas.