It is worth recalling that the team in this experience serves to illustrate a common situation in Spanish public administration IT departments: long-lasting in-house outsourced teams whose members do not feel a sense of belonging to neither the IT consulting firm nor the public organization acting as contractor \cite{zalewski2018working}. Note that we are not referring to the displacement of IT employees to the vendor, but to a body shop relation in which the outsourcer hires a specific amount of professionals from the insourcer. We believe that this context challenged the culture of continuous improvement brought by the agile transformation and contributed to the inertia which we are warned of in the fifth step of the Theory Of Constraints (TOC) \cite{AA1}. We assessed several possibilities in order to overcome this difficulty, which had not been detected at the beginning of the transformation process. We decided that team coaching and team emotional intelligence were powerful assets when addressing teams, so we designed a process which combined both techniques, calling it Emotional Team Coaching process (ETeC). Team coaching allowed us to act from the outside, as a mirror for the team, whereas working on the team’s emotions enabled us to transform negative feelings into positive feelings, thus empowering the team and directing it towards a common vision and goal.
Outsourcing Teams
Most of the existing literature on outsourcing focuses on the displacement of IT employees to the vendor, mostly to subcontractors outside the client’s country. By contrast, the experience report under consideration is referring to a managed service relationship where the outsourcer (public administration) hires a specific number of FTEs from an insourcer (consulting firm). It is a kind of body shop relationship very frequent in Spain. We have tried to make this clear in the introduction, as the above paragraph from the introduction showed. As aforementioned before, the paragraph already includes the reference to Zalewski’s book \cite{zalewski2018working}, which is one of the sources we found to more accurately reflect the feelings of IT professionals in similar scenarios to those of the team reported here. In his book, Zalewski analyzes the experiences of IT and HR professionals whose jobs were sold to outsourcing firms, as the following extracts serve to illustrate:
- “(…) the separation limits the opportunities to build social connections that would lead to internal job promotions.”
- “Because their jobs entailed streamlining services based on the vendor’s model for either IT or HR processes and providing customers with the product they were looking for, these professionals felt “chewed up” by both their old and new employers.”
- “They often had limited support for solving conflicts between expectations and reality for the vendor and the client”.
- “For most, continued employment meant doing the same thing at different client companies, not the opportunity to learn varied aspects within one’s field.”
- “Often, their opportunity for career growth is stunted”