News: 1584525610

Sack the people who deliver, concentrate on expanding sales. What could possibly go wrong?

"Infrastructure Services continue to be challenged by our margin improvement target, with our current trajectory not showing the growth we need"

Hmm, well maybe you should consider revising that target, instead of trying to attain the impossible.

Or try to achieve it by providing the sort of service that keeps customers. That requires staff who can deliver.

"Infrastructure Services need to have more direct and adequately skilled client-facing employees, with a shift of focus from indirect and above market roles to client centric new business growth within the market."

STOP FUCKING MAKING THEM REDUNDANT THEN!

Do you honesty think giving your customers a crap service is going to make them think "Hey - lets spend even more money with IBM". I'll tell you exactly what the customers are thinking.

"If I am going to get a crap service regardless of who I end up with, I might as well go with someone even cheaper".

If IBM don't want to do services, get the fuck out of that market sector and leave it to those that do. I really have never come across senior management so far out of touch with reality.

I think that sentence just says "stop doing your techo job and sell stuff instead". The "new business growth" bit is a bit of a giveaway.

As usual, the focus is on Sales rather than Delivery. As those in charge tend to be from Sales or Finance in the first place, they don't realise that "doing a good job of delivery" might actually be important.

Yes. But you can't grow business if you

1) Can't keep the customer happy with the service they are being given

2) Don't have the necessary people left who can deliver it

3) Don't have the staff that are capable enough to keep it running

This is where IBM shoot themselves in the head pretty much *every *single *time. There are rare cases where it doesn't happen, but sadly those are few and far between.

HPE

"I really have never come across senior management so far out of touch with reality."

Never worked in the civil service then, have you?

Well having been seconded to parts of the home office and then the foreign office, I met a number of people who were *very* much in touch.

" 1,248 people have been put [..] at risk "

IBM, you might want to go and check the definition of "overhead". It's no use complaining about your overhead if the people you lay off are not managers.

I seems like the ONLY way IBM make any profits these days is by laying off staff.

Not inovating, not providing world beating service, just keep cutting staff..... (not executives mind you).

Well. https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?catref=wmi100817

Two lions escape from the zoo and split up to increase their chances. When they finally meet after two months, one is skinny and the other overweight.

The thin one says, "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me with guns and nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass."

The fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a manager every day. Nobody even noticed!"

I am surprised they even bothered with redundancies. I would have thought that they would just introduce a few staffers with COVID-19 into the canteen and let nature take its course.

They have already deep sixed older experienced workers.

F*uk IBM and companies like them. If the execs at the top can't guide the company in the right directions and make the right decisions, don't take it out on the hard-working people who actually MAKE the company what it is. I'm totally p*ssed that when there's a dip here and there - that you would assume would be recoverable IF those execs did the right thing - heads must roll, and all to keep the shareholders and investors happy so they keep getting their dividend payouts. IBM can just go and f*ck right off.

Reg Rant score 92/100 IMO.

Nice effort - keep up the good work.

Agreed - a bit more capitalization would have pushed it up close to the 100 mark.

See Bombastic Bob's posts for a style (but generally not content) guide.

Any staff left?

@Pete4000uk: "Any staff left?"

Any contracts left? I was hoovered up into Big Blue in an outsourcing deal, as were many local employment options,... one poor bugger I worked with left IBM, only for his new employer to outsource to Big Blue and he was back in again. I just had a virtual mooch around Linkedin, and it would appear all the people I knew that were working on outsourced IBM contracts now appear to work directly for the company.

Take your pick of:

aggressive cost take-out

resource action

workforce rebalancing

redundancy

In the end, it all comes down to firing employees.

I would add another choice - innovate with products/services that the market wants at the right price.

Infrastructure Services continue to be challenged by our margin improvement target, with our current trajectory not showing the growth we need, as well as the erosion of existing contracts continuing to challenge us

Maybe try talking in plain English?

[1]Dilbert .

[1] https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-05

There's something more IBM could learn from a little further on.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-28

Another relevant Dilbert:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1991-11-18

Took a bit of finding...

Weren't they some sort of 20th century computer company or something?

> Statutory minimum redundancy terms are being offered to GTS IBMers. Those who exit under voluntary terms are estimated to leave on 26 June and those forced out of the door will be gone by 26 August.

Statutory minimum is sure to encourage lots of people to go voluntarily. Not.

PS: If you've got corona virus be sure to go in for your exit interview and shake your boss' hand to show there are no hard feelings.

@AC: "Statutory minimum is sure to encourage lots of people to go voluntarily. Not."

Gotta admit, it was this that pushed me over the edge to take VR, I knew the more than stat min offerings wouldn't last forever, so cashed out, and it turns out my redundo round was the last to offer more than stat min.

Ditto. I left HP when the redundancy payments were extremely good, I feel smug now as we all moved on and did a startup with the proceeds, but I feel sorry for people now being 'let go'.

IBM is really not relevant anymore; when they decreased investment and hiring GREAT scientists in Watson, this is the obvious result. Well done Ginny! Here is that golden parachute we promised you. We will be pushing you out at 30000 ft. (We told you it was gold didn't we?)

She lands on the gold rather than being given a parachute made of it.

I live in foreign and cannot open another U.K. bank account so am well and truly stuck with Lloyd’s for my old country banking. Their IT was pretty crap even before they gave it to the waste management company.

P.S. the UKs anti money laundering regulations now prevent any foreign resident who is not a money launderer from opening a bank account. It would not be a problem if my name ended in chev and had a few Cyrillic letters.

IBM definitely don’t value skills or experience, and do not allow their staff to join conferences or get training. Its difficult to know how they will survive when all the people working on their accounts are stuck in the 1990s in terms of technology.

@AC Training,... oh dear, when we were TUPEd in the early 2000s, the guy that came to tell us how brilliant is was going to be working for IBM told us we'd get two weeks training a year, not necessarily classroom, but at least CBT. In the 15 years I was blue, I got on two courses, one because there was cash for training while I was benched (and to my knowledge this happened precisely once) and one other time because someone dropped out of a course and we couldn't get a refund, so I went.

So, CBT,.... well, no. We were pressured to make all time booked chargeable to customers, in fact, if you had a 'flat' quarter, and didn't bill overtime to a customer, you'd get a nag about that, so using admin or training codes on our timesheets was a definite no no, any 'training' would have be done in our own time, or billed to a customer. One year there was a training goal set for everyone, that we all had to complete 40 hours of training (a fad that lasted precisely one year) but conference calls discussing the deployment of new centralised server management tool counted,..... so no actual training.

To bury bad news.

Alternatively IBM could remove huge costs by rationalising and restructuring 3 layers of EMEA level management and then sweating those remaining "managers" much harder. Thereby retaining the continually battered but talented front-line staff that actually do the work.

I guess that strategy just doesn't play to the maximisation of bonuses and dividends by the utilisation of cheap Indian and Asian labour though does it.

trouble is, who makes the strategy an business decisions?

Turkeys don't vote for christmas.