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For us field analysts, domain admin rights were taken away and users were instructed to contact the new help desk -- physically located in a different state -- for all computing issues. Gone was the familiar voice and customized service for users. In its place was a faceless voice reading from a cookie-cutter script and absolutely no practical knowledge of our day-to-day operations.
Here's the kicker: Because analysts and admins were now employees of different vendors, we were forbidden by our respective management to speak to each other directly. All communication was to be done via the tracking database in the tickets that were created by the out-of-state help desk. Since most of us were physically located in the same complex, it was an extremely frustrating situation. There were several times when an issue would come across our desk and we could see the guy at the other end of the cubicle farm who could resolve it, but we were forbidden to take it to him directly.
Confusion reigned and productivity plummeted as tickets were misrouted and lost, areas of responsibility were disputed, issues were diagnosed incorrectly, and descriptions were incomplete, inaccurate, or nonexistent. Work-stopping issues that should have been easily and quickly resolved spent days or even weeks getting shuffled around to the wrong departments and/or passed back and forth between the two outsource providers.
In the case of expired passwords, for instance, an issue that at one time had been easily resolved in less than 15 minutes with one phone call became a weeks-long testament to inefficiency and corporate BS. Word of the massive "Charlie Foxtrot" spread, and our competitors began referring to us by name as an IT model to be avoided at all costs. Both analysts and admins voiced their frustrations, and many offered ideas to make the chaotic situation better, but to no avail. In fact, in an absurd twist the more vocal of us were labeled as "not team players" because we spoke up about the futility of the system they had put in place.
Of course I got out of there as soon as I could. Recently I found a list of the worst CEOs in America, and the head of the company I had been outsourced to was ranked as one of the top 10 worst CEOs in the country. I guess this degree of incompetence trickles down from above.
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How does this sound like a good idea to anyone in management? You're paying an IT department to perform certain kinds of work. Then you sell that department in two chunks to a couple different companies, and hire everyone back, not as employees but as contractors, at (presumably) the same rate of pay. OK, so you're not directly paying for their benefits packages anymore, but the money you're paying to the contractor has to be roughly equal to what you were paying them when they were employees, because you're covering their salaries, the cost of whatever benefits package the new employer is giving them, plus a little somethin'-somethin' for the new employers to put in their own pockets.
Maybe the money for contractors comes out of a different line-item in the budget than payroll and benefits, and maybe that's advantageous to the company in some way.
But then, when you bring them back in as contractors, you build a Chinese wall between the two groups of employees so that they cannot function as a cohesive unit without going through additional layers of management. Which predictably and demonstrably creates a huge bottleneck and a delay in responding to user requests. Which also, predictably, results in frustration not only among those waiting for their IT needs to be addressed, but among those who should be addressing them.
And then, after treating the IT department not like part of your team, but like some sort of Lego-block commodity to be bought and sold; after making it impossible for them to work as a team; after all that, when they observe that it is nigh impossible for them to do their jobs in that environment, you accuse them of not being team players?
The mind boggles! Submitter, I'm glad you got out of there, and I hope you're in a much better situation now. It doesn't seem like it would be possible to be in a situation that was much worse!