Outsourcing

The pitch sounds great - let some technical company manage the technical side of your company and save you money because they have all the technical expertise. They'll handle development, production servers, you name it - just sign here.

Except that it is too good to be true. The outsourcing firm and your company do not share the same goals. Your company is trying to do what it does best while the company you've outsourced to is trying to cut costs (and service) so they can make more money. Eventually, this will bite you as the outsourced senior technical staff originally placed on your account leave and are replaced with very green staff managing your servers because they cost less. The outsourced team has no business knowledge so development takes way longer and is considerably buggier, but they were cheaper by the hour. Save 20% in hourly costs, but development time tripled and the new software truly sucks like the latest vacuum cleaner. And everything costs extra and isn't in the contract.

They also just moved a new guy to manage your servers. They moved him up from the call center or the mail room, but he had some training. He wants to know how to do an IISreset like you asked. "How do you spell IISReset?" he asks. He's looking it up in his training manual. Want him to edit the registry for you?

Oh yeah, production issue? They'll get right on that after we can find someone to handle your problem. They're busy with another client's problem and there's not enough staff to deal with your problem. In the end, you'll have to end up hiring technical people to keep an eye on their technical people.