A Fortune 500 Financial Services company had experienced skyrocketing resourcing costs for their IT function and embarked on a comprehensive operational improvement initiative to identify potential savings opportunities.
Situation: The firm had previously made heavy and liberal use of contract workers as opposed to employees to support resourcing of the IT function. Senior leadership determined that the true cost of this approach had not only become excessive financially but also introduced long-term risks to the firm’s operations. This occurred in part due to a lack of processes and mechanisms in place that incorporated long-term operational thinking as well as financial considerations when making resourcing decisions. The long term implications of this approach also led to a deep concern from senior leadership that the firm had not taken the necessary efforts to ensure that it was cultivating the institutional knowledge that it needed which had resulted in several operational failures.
Actions: We conducted a comprehensive data analysis effort of the IT organization and its resourcing strategy and coupled this analysis with a review of processes and procedures that governed operations, as well as interviewed managers to understand the context under which they had made resourcing decisions. This allowed us to identify strategies and procedures that would help to better position the firm to align with its long term strategic needs of the organization.
Result: The company updated its governance model, resource policies, and put in some additional guardrails to ensure that resourcing costs would be better controlled in the future. Moreover, they were able to achieve $XX million in savings in the first year that the program was put in place.