Is Your Position a Commodity Ready for Outsourcing?

 In my last article I made mention to be wary if your job is easily commoditized and the word “outsourcing” is floating around the office. So let’s discuss some ways to analyze your position to find out how “commoditizable” it really is, because, unless you own the company, your position is on the commodity scale somewhere between easily replaced and possible to replace with extreme difficulty.

The Business Machine

First we need a way to picture a larger company to help us understand the analogy I intend on using here. Large companies can be pictured like a giant machine filled with gears of various size that interface with other gears in different ways. Some gears only interact with the overall machine every now and then, while others interact constantly. There can be entire sections of the machine that operate independently except for an occasional and infrequent interaction.

Each gear is a person and each grouping of gears is a department. Some gears move very fast with a lot of input and output, while others move slower with minimal input and minimal output. Stepping back and looking at the entire machine, we can see that each gear impacts the overall system in some measureable way. Would the entire machine come to a grinding halt if some small gear was removed? Probably not, but the output would be different.

The Cog Material Benefit

Now let’s look at an individual gears, we see that they are each made of different materials. We can think of a more expensive material used for a gear as one that is more important to the overall system. It’s costly to replace and any time that the gear isn’t in the machine the output is vastly changed until it is replaced at great cost. This doesn’t always have to be an important manager or executive, but someone who is critical and hard to replace, like a head programmer or the leading salesperson.

Other gears will be made of plastic, will be small and have redundancy so if it fails the overall output may not change in any real measureable quantity. These gears will be spread out all over the machine interacting in different ways with different gears. To replace these gears you may only have to walk over to the parts drawer and swap it out quickly if needed.

Tying of Gears and Men

Hopefully you can see the machine/business analogy illustrated above in terms of how you fit into your company. Just to make sure I’ll bring this full circle and cover some simple examples of how positions are analogous to certain types of gears.

Someone that processes documents with a simple set of rules for approval and rejection would be a plastic gear. The rules of the behavior are simple to learn and follow. If a document processor were to quit, a replacement could be up and running at previous capacity within a week or two. The overall impact to the business as a whole would probably be so minimal as to go unnoticed.

A person who is the main subject matter expert for a critical project would be a metal gear with system wide importance. If this person were to leave the entire project would stop. The person could be replaced, which would take a long time as far as training and knowledge, or the team could try to reconfigure to make up for the lost knowledge and work effort. In either case, a machine wide disturbance would be felt, with a measurable difference in output.

There are also a select few within a company that can be so drastically important that the entire machine could stop if they were removed. While this is less likely as a company grows, it’s still possible. Is there anyone you know at your company that everything has to go through? Someone that has all the answers that no one else has? There is your gear made of the strongest and most expensive stuff, a gear that may never be replaceable.

An Honest Material Analysis

Think about the three types of gears above, and the infinite range of gear types within them. Which are you? Step back and think about how your work impacts the overall business. Once you have an honest appraisal of how you impact your business you can determine how hard it is to replace you. Are your duties repetitive? Was you training short and simple? If you go on vacation does anyone notice a drop in output?

Honesty with your self is the most important part of this process. Coming to terms with who you are in the machine will only help you figure out your next move, which is to become a more expensive gear. Coerce the machine to be more dependent on your gear’s functionality. If enough processes become dependant on you, the overall machine can’t afford to have a simple plastic gear in the position.

Start small in your aspirations to test the waters of change. Not every machine wants to reconfigure, and if it doesn’t you should take your gear and find a more flexible machine. It won’t take long for decision makers to notice they have a plastic cog doing a metal cogs work.

Circling Back to Commodities and Outsourcing

It should be obvious by now that a company is less likely to outsource something that is not a commodity. A plastic gear is a commodity; a complicated custom gear is not so easily commoditized. Be a complicated and custom gear made of the most expensive material. Be someone your company would have to be crazy to try and replace. Outsourcing a complicated position is …. well … complicated!

Cubicle Location Pros and Cons When Working in a Skyscraper

Moving cubes is a fact of life in the corporate world. I've lost count the number of times I've had to pack up and move everything over to another cube. Each location had its own pros and cons. It really sounds like a silly thing to consider, and normally you have little to no control over it, but it's still worth a quick look.

If you are unlucky enough to get placed in a group cube, I'm sorry but you are lost. No privacy, contant interruptions, and lots of noise. Get out as soon as you can, no one will take you seriously if they have to swing by a group cube to have a chat.

Among the real cube territory, the bottom of the totem pole is the one in some deep dark corner far away from anyone. While it may seem like an ideal place for a lot of people, the lack of exposure will make you seem like a cave troll. For a certain type of personality, this will be ideal, but know that it may be a dead-end.

Another trap is the cube with a window view. While I love looking seeing natural light, the cube location is normally also not in a high traffic area. This is a step up from the dark corner cube, but in all reality it's another out of the way location that causes your profile to diminish for lack of exposure.

Among the best locations is in the highest traffic areas. You suffer a slight hit on your privacy, but your profile stays nice and high. Your peers will always see you hard at work, and your management team will see you always buzzing around. It's a win-win.

When looking at the next rung, no detail is too small to think about.

What Happens When the Next Rung is Management?

As a young professional I often ponder where my career is going. Can I guide it? If so, where should I attempt to guide it to? Is management the only real path in climbing the corporate ladder? There are always questions and uncertainty, and sometimes it feels like I'm trapped on a path. In the last year or so I have found other paths that I didn't think were available to me, and in following these new paths I have found ways t climb the ladder without having to become the dreaded middle manager.

Years ago I was in retail banking. Like now, my main goal was to climb up the ladder. My reasons then mostly centered around money. The things I wanted to do costed more than I could afford at the time (mostly travel). Over the years I worked up from a front line teller to a lead sales person, and then I jumped into management. Eventually I found myself one step away from being the head manager of a branch, and that's when my self-reflections began. That kind of leadership role was not something for me. Using my experience I was able to jump-ship and get a corporate operations job with the same salary.

The new job was something more akin to my early days as a teller. The field users would call in, and I would process their requests. It was mind numbing on the best days, but it afforded me the mental bandwidth to learn a lot about my employer and quickly make myself far more useful than my job description would suggest. Within a year I had earned a promotion into my first individual contributor role.

Unlike every job I had ever occupied up to this point, there was no customer service aspect. days would go by without even a phone call or e-mail, I just produced results. I earned a reputation as a producer, but found my satisfaction with the job lacking. Total freedom sounded interesting, but I felt disconnected from the world. After a year I took a Business Analyst position at the same company.

This is where I found my sweet spot. While still an individual contributor in some aspects of my job, there was now a new large social aspect of my position. On any given day I would spend several hours in analysis mode, then switch into social mode as meetings were held to discuss the project. I had found a path that didn't require management, and a lucrative one at that.

Once more I stand at the edge of the career path cliff. I can no longer see the path to the next rung that doesn't involve management, and I'm still as uncertain about it today as I was all those years ago. While I enjoy business analysis, I have no intention of doing this for the rest of my career. Is there something more interesting out there? I hope so.