This is the final piece in our Cutting Enterprise IT blog series. Although the title is a bit "Tongue in Cheek", we are deadly serious in our assertion. Blindly following just one of the mentioned 7 headcount reduction principals, can really hurt the viability of your organization.
We assume in this article that Enterprise IT is in charge of these headcount cuts. If not, there are other problems that are not discussed here.
Here are a few assumptions behind our observation:
There is an amount of money that must be cut from your budget. It must be cut now
All the contractors you thought reasonable to cut are gone.
You've accumulated the 6 lists that suggested in our earlier post, "Deciding who to cut in Enterprise IT"
Worse news
Security and network management can’t be cut now – and may need more top performers assigned
Critical AI/competitive development may be untouchable while applications upgrades critical to continuous improvement are delayed
Projects saving money (like cloud or BYOD deployment) have to keep going
Traditional methods for cutting headcount
Here are 7 traditional methods that companies have used from time immemorial. In crisis situations, companies tend to use just one of these rules of thumb to decide on cuts.
A) Cut people not essential (leaving top performers and almost enough people – more from less)
B) Cut people not contributing their cost this year (fill-in)
C) Cut people, not top performers, cut more (fill-in)
D) Move top performers, and bump down until enough fall off (more from fewer)
E) Cut wages across the board (wait for next cut)
F) Cut non-critical development first, operations last (do less)
G) Cut administrative, then cut bottom performers up (get-by)
Our team has seen bad outcomes occur from each of these applied exclusively.
We'd love to get your point of view on each of these methods. Log a comment below.
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