As Eddie has pointed out, the organisation that I work for has been ‘forced’ to let a number of my contractor colleagues go. The writing has been on the wall for a couple of weeks due to typical budget bureaucracy and projects not being approved and funded as soon as we’d hoped. I’ve seen this happen at other departments before with similar results.

The whole IT area was summoned to a 9AM muster and told that each of us fall into three groups:

1. You’ve already been spoken to and it’s likely (but not guaranteed) that your contract will be renewed at the end of its term (mostly June 30th), or
2. You haven’t been spoken to and your contract will not be renewed at the end of its term, or
3. Your agency will be contacted shortly and your contract will be terminated 2 weeks from now.

I’m in group #2. This is how it seems to be playing out on the ground at the moment:

• Group #1 will be hedging their bets looking for new work and may leave anyway if they don’t get renewed in a timely manner - or a better offer comes up,
• Group #2 will be looking for new work and may leave early, and
• Group #3 will at least have a head-start on the jobs market.

Although, as a contractor there is always a risk that you may not get renewed (you should expect that), it’s most disrupting to those who had their contracts ended early.

The worst thing about all this is that the development team that I’ve been supporting was just starting to jell and kick some goals. Some of the process & quality improvement initiatives that have happened in the last 3 months are:

• A move to a “Branch by Feature” source structure to provide isolation between teams and bug fixes,
• Quality gates & testing requirements before integrating back into Main,
• Upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2008 for significant version control performance improvements,
• Two-way synchronisation between HP/Mercury Quality Center Defects & TFS Work Items,
• Implementation & customisation of the MSF CMMI process template,
• Continuous integration with automatic unit tests & deployment to development environment, and
• Better communication & relationships between Business Analysts, Developers, Testers, Infrastructure & Project Management.

Unfortunately this is a triple-whammy for the organisation. Not only will they lose valuable corporate knowledge but it will tarnish the great reputation they have built up over the years. So when/if the funding does come through:

1. They’ve lost all the people who know the work & the business,
2. They can’t get anybody to come back, because they’ve moved on, and
3. New people may be reluctant to join.

And then it takes time to ramp up productivity and momentum again, while business complains that IT isn’t delivering in a timely manner and the cycle continues.

So “good luck” to those who are looking for work and “stay strong” to those who are hanging around.