Leverage your ‘benched resources’ better.

I came across this line many years ago, and today it still stands true as ever. Here it is:

Availability is not a skill.

Take a moment for that to sink in.

Now think about how many times you’ve heard an HR person say, "We have X number of people with skills in Y and Z technologies. They want to go to the US and work. So, let’s find opportunities to place these people in organizations that require these skills, preferably in the US."

This is the traditional "body shopping" model, where you farm bodies with specific skills to different customers who may need those skills.

In this model, the hapless marketing and sales teams were pressured to identify those organizations that use these technologies and check with them if they need additional hands for development, maintenance, or testing.

There was absolutely no marketing, selling, or adding value to a customer. If the resources chosen by those organizations perform well, they were just lucky — both the resources and the organization that hired them.

Most marketing collateral and campaign mailers included information on the number of resources available immediately, their skill sets, and the cost at which they were available. If there was a requirement, the client requested a technical discussion with the candidates and screened them. Once that was done, they were onboarded.

This clinched deals for organizations, which resulted in multimillion-dollar opportunities.

From body shopping to outsourcing to digital transformation

Around the 2010s, people stopped selling availability as a skill (though they still internally considered it a skill). They started positioning their outsourcing services, as adding value to the customers’ businesses, and the outsourced organization did the project management.

From here, organizations moved on to consulting and further value addition. Today, it has evolved into a digital transformation initiative. This has gained enormous traction in the last three years. Consulting services organizations have transformed existing traditional and non-digital business processes and services or created new ones to meet the evolving market and customer expectations.

This has altered how businesses are managed and operated and how value is delivered to customers.

And that takes me back to my original point.

Is availability still a skill??

While it is essential to provide value addition to customers, the mere "availability of resources" cannot be considered a skill. In fact, at any point, as a services organization, you would have resources that are not billed. What do you do with such resources?

Service delivery today has evolved tremendously, where customers come to you for the value you provide, not for cost arbitrage. Today, there is an R&D unit in every service organization that is not billed, but that unit helps make your service delivery efficient and better. You build reusable components, frameworks, intelligence, and automation models to make your service delivery efficient. You can completely crash your development and quality engineering timelines with such initiatives.?

Besides, these resources can be used to work on product modules and professional services engagements where you can build efficiency in product implementations, customizations, and configurations.

?Look out for the next big thing.

At Zuci Systems , we are always on the lookout for the next big thing when it comes to technology. A large portion of our time and efforts go towards research and development, building reusable components, intelligence models, and products for the larger market. This helps us provide better experiences and faster delivery to our customers.

Besides, we have products in testing, BFSI, intelligence, and analytics. Our resources are constantly working on these products. This has allowed us to apply product engineering principles to our service delivery, producing exemplary quality. This has also immunized us from macroeconomic uncertainties like slowdowns and recessions to a large extent.

Don’t ever position availability as a skill at any point of your business journey.?

Be maniacal about offering value to customers. Ultimately that is what they are paying for.?

Merely having resources is not a solution in itself, unless they are aligned with your customers’ needs and your goals as an organization.?

Image credit: Photo by?Smartworks Coworking?on?Unsplash