My new project at work has still not been advertised at the client, so I still have to be careful about who I tell about my new project's client.
So today, I had lunch with two of my former co-workers, who used to work for Accenture but then moved on to other companies, and one current co-worker who will be joining me on the new project. Well, it turns out one of the former co-workers works for the company who is my new client! Since her company has not communicated the new project yet, I had to make sure no one else talked about it to her. News travels fast, though, since she said during our lunch that Accenture was working with a group right next to hers to outsource some application support to India.
Indeed, that is my new group. I couldn't say anything at lunch, but I took the opportunity to ask questions to her about it. She was somewhat resigned to the company doing what it wants, although I never got her to admit that off-shore outsourcing was a good idea. It certainly isn't for someone who stands to lose their job to someone working in India.
Even so, she would certainly know someone who would be affected by the new project. As far as I can tell, she won't be directly, but who knows what the future will hold? There is the potential for us to get a lot more of the client's applications if this first wave is successful.
I look forward to being able to see her more often, since I soon will be relocated to her building (in fact, if she is savvy enough and had any reason to look, she could now find my name in the client's list of users having access to their corprate LAN), but it will be a challenge being there. Not only because I will be learning technologies and applications I've never used before, but also because of my direct involvement of moving tasks US IT personnel were performing to personnel in India.
Posted by Rob Reid at January 29, 2004 02:14 PM