DXC Technology warns techies that all travel MUST now be authorised DXC Technology's UK staffers have had their wings clipped by the imposition of some stringent belt tightening - all travel must now be authorised before personnel can visit other sites, including customers. In an "urgent internal communication" sent to employees - seen by us - the outsourcing badass-cum-cloud-wannabe warned of …
Not surprised at all they're doing stuff like this to their own people, because they certainly do a good job of fucking over their customers, and like today, sometimes not only one of their biggest customers but a sister company. It doesn't inspire much confidence in them at all.
Hey DXC, Maybe don't revoke all of our permissions in the CRM tomorrow, huh? Funny enough that their permissions weren't affected and neither were employees who don't really matter in administration like financial analysts and workforce management and such. They deleted an entire permissions group that basically had all of Frontline tech, field tech, Escalations, sales, senior manglement, partners/vendors etc. It's the third time in as many quarters as they've pooched in a real big way in the middle of the workday in North America.
DXC are truly incompetent, to the point that they make the muppets at Infosys, Wipro, Accenture and Mphasis seem like they know what they're doing, and that's pretty fucking sad in and of itself.
"How else can you explain non-cancellation of contracts?"
Minimum contract terms, exit fees and the need to setup something to replace DXC/get services out of DXC managed facilities.
All of the companies I am aware of (high single figures) are doing exactly that - they have been preparing over the last 6+ months to move to in-house teams to allow them to migrate to something that works.
In general, DXC doesn't do anything and the few helpful and capable staff that haven't been fired will probably be let go soon.
To be fair (and I can't believe I just said that), we had exactly the same policy in the US, and it really didn't impact the ERP side that much. The two week lead time isn't such a big deal for regular consulting, and for critical emergencies we all work remote anyway. Most customers who have their own IT infrastructure have their own staff, so if the core database server goes down there's not much point having a technical consultant on site until the server is up - and when the server is up, you can remote in anyway.
I'm sure that for a class of customer this is going to cause real issues, but DXC doesn't;t care about those customers anyway.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company. After three years in post my boss told me to get my CV out and polish it up. I could use him and another HOD as referees and they would give me help to polish my CV and get a good job. I was shocked, I thought I was doing OK in the role. He told me it wasn't me, but HR had just told him to cut back on travel expenses. No more business class travel, no more hotels unless they were on an "approved" list which was short and composed of budget hotels mostly without restaurants. He then said his experience was that as soon as a company starts to trim minor expenditure like travel it's a sign that it has already slashed other budget elements to the bone and beyond. In short it was time to leave before the inevitable happened. We all took his advice and we got decent jobs with his help. Two years later that company was closed down.
The surprise with DXC isn't the slashing of budgets and staff, the surprise is that it's lasted this long.
BTW, I applied the expense rule when HP started to trim budgets and left them years ago. Thanks once more to my boss thirty years ago who taught me a useful lesson.
Back in (pre-split) HP days we had stationery cupboards, guarded by admins (remember them?) well stocked with notepads, pens etc.
Fast forward a few years - a team of was working long term on a customer site and wanted new notepads. We found that we couldn't just have a few notepads - there was a minimum order of £30 and it required multiple levels of approvals. Rather sadly, and to my shame, I gave up and bought my own - wouldn't do it now.
”Back in (pre-split) HP days we had stationery cupboards, guarded by admins (remember them?) well stocked with notepads, pens etc.”
I remember one admin in our office some time back who would go and retrieve whatever you needed from the locked stationery cupboard.
If she was busy, she’d give you the key but woe betide you if you took more pens or Tipp-Ex than you told her you were going to take... She knew exactly how much of everything was in that cupboard.
Things went downhill when she stopped buying Bic pens for those horrible Niceday things. Company shut down about six months later.
Back in (pre-split) HP days we had stationery cupboards, guarded by admins (remember them?) well stocked with notepads, pens etc.
I used to work for HP. And the so-called "admins" were sleeping in their job.
I would "raid" their stationary hoard and make sure our floor's were well stocked. And then they would (later) come down and ask if they could "borrow" for ours.
True story - a couple of weeks ago at our site standup meeting, HR let us know that somebody had left a note in their suggestion box complaining about the hardness of the toilet paper. The note was of course written on several sheets of said 2-ply sandpaper
DXC don't supply pens, notepads, paperclips or anything else that would be useful to do our actual jobs.
the only reason most of us have paper to write on, is because we take it from the printers.......
One company I worked at many years ago (non-IT company, long since shut down) had one of the owners/execs fussing over having to buy toilet paper. My comment was if we ran out of toilet paper I could just start using incoming customer orders.
I worked for a manager with similar ethics in the past and if he ever needed someone to pick up a 'gutty job' it was because it had to be done and the books would get balanced at some point.
Amazing how managers that treat their staff like real people get respect while bean-counters get the finger
I used to live within 30 minutes of Gatwick airport (south of London). In a penny-pinching move, company decided I had to fly from Luton even though an equivalent flight was available from Gatwick. It was at some ridiculously early time of day too.
Needless to say the return taxi trip to Luton soon made up the difference...
I was in a similar boat. I lived in South Sacramento California, worked in West Sac, the airport was in North Sac, & I could be to either my work or the airport in under an hour.
My work demanded I fly to another state for some training, dictated the flights I would take to get there & back, and I stupidly thought they would make me fly out of Sac.
No. They booked me out of LAX which is a *fourteen hour drive* to the South, or a few hours flight, or a day long train ride.
When I pointed out it would cost more in petrol to drive there than the plane ticket to fly, more in bus or train fare than the plane ticket, did my work reconsider the wisdom of their choice?
No. They insisted I drive myself to LAX to catch the plane. I refused on the grounds that I couldn't afford the fuel, would have to take two days to legally make the drive (max 8 hours drive time per day), couldn't afford to leave my car in long term parking, yadda yadda yadda. They tried to convince me to get a friend to go with me to help drive & then drive my car back after dropping me off. I said no. Back & forth, back & forth, until they finally *demanded* I make the drive.
I told them they could fire me or pay for the flight from Sac to LAX, because I was *not* driving there. They threatened to call my bluff, I told them to make sure to do it in writing.
They asked why in writing? I said "For when I sue your asses for violating the law & firing me in retaliation for refusing to break the law on your behalf."
Oddly enough I got the plane ride to LAX. Fekkin bastards.
I left less than a year later. They had started the "counting paperclips" phase of the downward spiral. =-\
Just curious what route did you take which required 14 hours from Sacramento to LAX? Even driving from Sac to the coast and taking highway 1 shouldn't take 14 hours (maybe 11 ?).
Normal route I-5 or Highway 99 is at most I'd say 8 hours even in abnormally bad traffic. I have made the trip from Seattle to Sacramento(en route to bay area) in 14 hours(on multiple occasions). Have lived in Modesto approaching 3 years now and trips to Orange county are probably just under 7 hours(with traffic) and of course that is further than LAX. I cruise typically 5-7 MPH above the speed limit on the highways, only going above when needing to pass, so not as if I'm driving super fast.
Still batshit crazy for a company to do that to you.
The car I had at the time could barely sustain the 55MPH required to be freeway legal. Try to do 60MPH and it would try to shake itself into a trillion tiny bits. The only way it could do 70+ was to shove it out the back of a transport plane & let it reach terminal velocity. =-J
The part over the mountains was the part that nearly killed my car. I had to stop every few minutes, pop the bonnet, let the car cool down, & then refill the radiator with coolant before daring to try again.
Coming back down wasn't a problem, I nearly left the car turned off & just coasted home, but getting there over the crest had me worried I might get passed by quadreplegics in under powered wheelchairs. =-J
My first car could just about do 60 when the federal limit was 55. SF to Santa Barbara on 101 was 6 hours. Then on to LAX was another 90 min. So Sac to LAX by the scenic route was around 9 hours. Doing the straight I - 5 would knock almost two hours off that.
I never did do The Grapevine in that car but I did do the Conejo Grade on 101 and the 17 Summit many times. Even when the temperature was 100 plus. Thats when I learned to drive with the car heater going full blast. To keep the engine from overheating while climbing the grade. That heater trick has saved me on a number of occasions. Although it is a new form of misery to run the heater full blast when the outside temp is well into the triple digits. Builds character.
I once did it for several weeks while driving around Los Gatos during the summer (into the triple digits most days) before my mechanic told me when I left my car in for a service that the reason why the engine was running hot was because there was almost no coolant flowing through the radiator. Turns out that old BMW's had very very good heaters.
Needless to say the return taxi trip to Luton soon made up the difference...
But not for the trauma of Luton. I wonder if they ever finished the upgrade (or whatever they were doing) of the airport.
Unless it has improved massively I'd rather fork some of my own money than suffer LTN.
The place I work for uses a travel agent for bookings. *Every* time I put in a request I highlight in bold *LHR* because I live 20 mins from the airport. And every time they come back with Luton. So I have to explain, every time, that to get the 7AM flight they want me to take out of Luton I need to be at the airport at 5.30, which means leaving the house at 4.30, which means getting up at 4. Which I'm not going to do. So they need to put me up at a hotel, which, including expenses and cabs makes it about £350-400, making the LHR flight seem very reasonable. Yet they still do it.
They also expect you to fly economy for a 20 hr long haul (including connection) and still go straight to a customer. No bed, no shower. I just refuse to go now.
I'll admit, I admire your pedantry.
Heathrow's really close to me. There are several different routes there. The local minicab drivers know them all and all talk to each other so I'm likely to get there at that time of morning without too much issue, In contrast, getting to Luton involves the M25 or the North Circular, both of which can quickly descend into chaos. So you need to leave way more time to allow for this.
Heathrow's also pretty easy to get through security. They also have fast track lanes which I can use.
And most importantly, there are generally (but not always) more flights available from Heathrow. So where there might only be a 7AM (or earlier) flight from Luton or Gatwick, there will be several options between 7 & 9 at LHR, from different airlines, all heading to the same destination. So where I would need to get up at 4 (just as an example - don't hold me to it) to get a flight from Luton, I might be able to get up at 6 and still be able to get a flight from Heathrow to get me to my meeting on time.
I don't like getting up at 4 in the morning, especially if I have to travel then spend a couple of hours presenting. I'm not very good at doing that without adequate sleep.
My company's travel agent doesn't see this. They just see the "cheapest flight" policy and don't factor in the extra cost of cabs up to Luton and the fact that if I have to get up that early I don't have the energy to do my job so there's little point in me going anyway.
Besides, going back to your point, 40 mins extra in bed is quite a lot. But no, it's not as simple as that. But I think you know that.
I'm very thankful that in my current company, the only main rule for expenses is "don't take the piss". They do have some limits for meals and the likes, but they're generous enough that I hardly ever exceed them. Similarly for flights, there are some guideline limits in place, and I've booked a number of flights that classify as "none-compliant", but so long as you can justify why you've booked that flight (ie, no cheaper option available, times of other flights unsuitable) it usually goes through without a hitch.
I've been out of DXC for a year or so now. I was there when the $250 limit was in place and it made no difference; it applied to the overall UK company but individual accounts could (and did) set their own policies on RTAs such that any travel had to have an RTA anyway.
Non-billable travel, below $250 or not, was never approved and billable travel was still scrutinised. On one memorable occasion I had to do an RTA for mileage of 40 miles in my car. That required four approvals including that of an L3 manager - for an expense of £4.40. The word 'madness' really doesn't do the situation justice. And the scary thing? No-one in management thought it was wrong...
Without it a lot of layers of management would be redundant. It's called job preservation. You might argue, of course, that it would be a much better way of cutting costs to take out those layers of management and allocate the front-line staff travel budgets.
If they really wanted to prune the budget then the best place to start is at the top.
If you want to cut back a tree so it'll stay healthy you start pruning from the top, not take a chainsaw to the base & wonder what went wrong when the whole thing comes crashing down.
Cut off the CEO's (I like beheadding, it's inexpensive!) and the company will quickly have hundreds of millions more to spend.
Cut out all middle manglement & they'll have hundreds of BILLIONS to spend.
See how easy that is? Here, I'll go get the Guillotine...
The 'cull the top management and save millions' argument is often made but fact is you need a CEO and a Board to run the company. If it's not Lawrie then it would be someone else earning similar money.
There ARE big savings to be made in the middle management layers. There are thousands of L4/L5/L6s receiving large salaries and it's not really clear what they actually DO; they certainly aren't bringing money in. A cull of the middle layers would generate significant savings.
Just asking, did you mean run the company, or run the company into the ground?
Reading your comment, I couldn’t help but think about the HP/Autonomy fraud trial going on over here at the moment and the consensus opinion of almost all the commentards that HP would have been far better off in every way if the entire board had been replaced with cardboard cutouts.
Of course, being cardboard cutouts, they wouldn’t have been able to carefully read and study a due diligence report expensively prepared ahead of a £multi-billion aquisition, like what a real board of directors would do.
Hang on a minute...
Cut off the CEO's (I like beheadding, it's inexpensive!) and the company will quickly have hundreds of millions more to spend.
I've often said IBM could save lots of money if they outsourced their CEO and Board to India rather than the work staff. I'm sure you could find someone there to take the CEO position for 30K/yr. And they probably wouldn't do any worse of a job doing it.
Better still, set up a pool of people to CEO a number of companies at once, a sort of job share but the other way around. You get the economy of scale that is always talked about in offshoring (but never delivered) and as any MBA knows, all companies run the same.
I think I'm joking...
Ex-HPEr here, I got stung by this before it was DXC.
Used to be based in the NE and have to be based at one of the two DCs there. The two DCs were less than 25 miles apart. Whatever work we did at one site usually had to be replicated at the other for most customers.
Towards the end of my time there we were given a similar ultimatum about travel and had to get full travel approval for a return journey from one site to another, even though the customer had paid for it and it set the company back less than £20 each time we did it.
Four levels of managerial approval involved, up to a US director for our technical discipline. Complete false economy, even if it took all four managers less than 5 minutes to review the request, I bet their involvement in billable hours cost more than the request to travel in the first place...
Same with overtime approvals - submit more than two weeks in advance, get approval from customer account and internal technical discipline/group. Fantastic until you realise we were on the hook for live support and typically got paged/called OOH for faults as well as planned work. Some of my team started refusing to do OOH work because their overtime requests weren't been honoured or approved for fixing outages.
... Our workload massively expanded when they laid off equivalent teams at the other UK DCs and we ended up having to pick up the slack, whilst filling in all of this crap at the same time. Didn't stay long at HPE after that.
Same with overtime approvals - submit more than two weeks in advance, get approval from customer account and internal technical discipline/group. Fantastic until you realise we were on the hook for live support and typically got paged/called OOH for faults as well as planned work. Some of my team started refusing to do OOH work because their overtime requests weren't been honoured or approved for fixing outages.
That should have been all of the team. And all of the team should have refused doing any overtime at all, down to the second. The bean counters button sorters do take notice when the penalties for missed SLAs start coming in.
... Our workload massively expanded when they laid off equivalent teams at the other UK DCs and we ended up having to pick up the slack, whilst filling in all of this crap at the same time. Didn't stay long at HPE after that.
An increased workload is no problem whatsoever unless you like to finish that workload. In situations like this, I see that as SEP (Somebody Else's Problem). But you should have been gone before it got that far.
The writing is clearly on the wall with DXC in the UK.
They are fiddling while Rome burns around them.
Don't be surprised if the whole thing is just a memory this time in 2021. {being generous there}
Now going to walk the dog. My route will take me close to their wallless offices in Aldershot. I'll give them a finger from all that like me have worked for the most incompetant set of managers in the Universe. I feel sorry for those who are trying to do a good job but are constantly shafted by people who really don't have a clue.
I left DXC 18 months ago with a very generous payoff (thanks to some rather good TUPE terms from my previous employer). My wife started getting cross with me shouting 'Haha I've got your money suckers!' every time I drove past the Aldershot office. I just say it in my head now.
Typical travel discussion at DXC
Boss: I need to you to travel to customer site next week for an urgent meeting.
Me: OK, but can you approve my travel?
Boss: No, you need to submit a request for travel and justify your costs.
Me: But you want me to go, personally I don't want to travel
Boss: You have to follow the process or you need to explain to the customer why you can't make it.
Me: Ok - I have submitted the travel request, but it was rejected by your boss.
Boss: You need to contact them and explain why you need to travel
Repeat process for the next week until the customer makes a big fuss and eventually management relent and approves travel at the last minute forcing the company to pay more for the travel as only expensive tickets are available.
I recall hearing a long, drawn-out "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO" from the other side of the desk partition and walked around to find the boss doing the budget.
One of the budget lines is T&E. Now, does he a) follow the current "thou shalt not" ruling and put zero in there, in the full and certain knowledge that this will result in a massive overrun he will have to explain or b) put a realistic figure in there and have to explain to his boss why his budget rides roughshod over a board level edict?
I sent him this. He printed it off and included it in his budget presentation...
Harvard argues the financial case for investing in workers:
1. Cost reductions from higher retention and less overtime labor
2. Higher revenues from better operational execution
3. Productivity gains from smoothed workloads.
I am sure Harvard never interacted with DXC top vultures.
Nobody likes sales droids, but there are no sales without them. And generally, sales droids can jump ship and land pretty much anywhere they like, since being economical with the truth is a skill in demand.
Hence, travel expense shenanigans usually precede an exodus of said droids, and imminent company collapse.
Best thing I ever did was walk away from the dumpster fire that is DXC. Left 18 months ago for a job that payed less but it was worth it because I’m now in a job that’s safe, a job I enjoy going to every day and the management actually care about the staff. Also after 12 months I got a pay rise for my efforts so I’m now earning more than I did at the toxic hell hole that is DXC.
I still keep in touch with a few people that are left in the dungeons of DXC, it’s an even worse place to work at now which I didn’t think was possible when I left.
Mike Lawrie... what a charlatan. History books will list this grifter as a lesson in how to run a business into the ground by being a complete and utter gobsh**e.
Anyone left in this failing company, get out now!
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The actual "rule" is apply 2 weeks before the 2 weeks you need to travel - there are up to 6 levels of approval account manager staff manager then a long level of managers up to L2, but normally their PA. so plan well ahead!
The cost / effort of the process must be staggering, I had one picked up my train ticket and he'd gone off to investigate and said I could save £5 a week by using local trains rather than Virgin - which would only add an extra hour each way a day to my travel - well wouldn't I wouldn't have gone - so then had to write a "memo" to justify the cost, the discussion must have cost more.
I assume the 8 hours training will include the mandatory ethics and corporate stuff - which you need a shower after doing.
"so then had to write a "memo" to justify the cost, the discussion must have cost more."
I'd have just asked him if he would do it too.
and quietly made the customer aware that I was spending 2 hours less and I could be onsite - at the daily chargeout rate - due to this policy.
"It means no travel."
This is exactly the line taken 25 years ago when we had our expenses capped at rates lower than the prevailing accomodation charges.
Manglement eventually realised that meant we could only fit 30-45 minutes in onsite without going into overtime (which they were refusing to pay too, so we wouldn't work it)
Get familiar with your contract. You can't be forced to work unpaid overtime - it must come out as time off in lieu and "from time to time" doesn't mean "every other day". On top of that, if the hours worked divided by the pay received goes below minimum wage, it's a criminal matter - _EVEN_ if you're on a salary, not a wage.
"work to rule" is one of the more devastating forms of industrial action you can take, because it gives seagull management _nothing_ to use and if they try harrassment or standover tactics, industrial mediators _will_ hand them their heads on a plate. "I'm only paid for 8 hours. Outta here. Sorry, not sorry"
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I was at HP almost 5 years ago when the split had been announced (as a contractor). The corporate speak was they were trying to close the offices around London to concentrate everyone in Newcastle and Erskine and get away from the contractor culture. Sadly, as they were even then shedding staff constantly they could only get contractors, except for the grads who got a 2 year contract and then booted for the next lot.
Seeing as they also change recruitment agencies constantly in another attempt to shave the budget, I get the odd call now and again asking if I'd go back from a sheepish recruiter who already knows the answer, and anyone who deals with contract recruiters on a regular basis knows they they are (generally) utterly shameless so it takes quite a lot to make them sheepish.
..with this one to be honest.
Authorisation is now required for any non-billable trips?
How did it work before - a techie could just take it upon themselves to pop out the office and go wherever they wanted?
Can't imagine that was ever abused!
On a smaller scale I get people trying to take the mick all the time.. Long ways around.. Visits in an order making no geographical sense.. Claiming visits are required for issues clearly resolvable remotely.. And these would be billable trips! Not encouraged as the idea is not to have the customers pants down.
Unless I'm entirely missing the point, it sounds like they all need reigning in!
Looking back at the 2017 story, complaints there that they can only spend a £10 on breakfast and £20 for an evening meal. You'd struggle to find a Premier/Hilton etc charging more than that. Funny, if they were on hols with their families in a hotel, you can wager they'd come way under that threshold.
Half a story there, booked into hotels on the approved list with a special DXC rate that does not include breakfast. Breakfast £19.99 in Hilton, not much cheaper in Holiday Inn. Hotels in remote locations knew that they could charge what they felt like and the traveller would pay up.
Solution was to take a £20 taxi to the closest place we could get two courses for under £25 and then a £20 taxi back. All above board and never questioned.
I once had to wait 3 days to get permission to travel to Chorley for a laptop repair. They were quite happy for me to spend 3 days doing nothing while 4 people approved the trip and argued over which cost center was going to pick up the bill. And then the best part of a day to drive up there only for it to be replaced since they had stacks of newer machines from those who'd recently left.
That's why you allow mobile and remote staff to travel as needed to get the job done.
Are these hard to come by? What is the salary? Could I just weigh the paperclips on a very accurate set of scales and take the rest of the week off?
Once they clamp down on travel and expenses, redundancies are on the way as night follows day.
If you see a bunch of strangers walking around with clip-boards (or probably tablets today), you are about to be acquired by a bigger, nastier company.
I had a mate who worked at IBM when it was going through a rough time, and then Lou Gerstner came in. In those day's if you wanted to take a days leave you had to get your leave card signed by your manager. The head of the Software division dutifully took his leave card for Lou to sign, and (apparently) Lou refused to sign it and said "you are in charge of a multi billion dollar division, if you cannot manage your annual leave - you are in the wrong job".
Lou also got rid of executives who added no value, or could not make tough decisions, and my mate said it was like a breath of fresh air because they could do things without management assistance.
Gerstner was absolutely right but sadly DXC didn't get the memo, or read Gerstner's book.
DXC seems to be pretty much an autocracy, with Lawrie making almost all decisions, no matter how trivial. HP was similar in the years pre-split; it was said that the head of HP UK&I was not able to authorise pay rises.
This way of working is wrong and it makes so-called senior 'leaders' into managers, implemented orders from above.
"HP was similar in the years pre-split; it was said that the head of HP UK&I was not able to authorise pay rises."
It also leads to inane stuff like HP substituting vastly inferior components in computers, then the managers saying "like it or lump it" to the customer - which is the wrong thing to say to anyone who knows the sale of goods act and rules applying to substution (like for like is OK. Downgrading to something worth half as much, with 1/3 the performance and keeping charging the same price is court territory - and this is on the NDNA contracts so it's affected a lot of institutions.)
"The latest measure is hardly surprising, given that DXC is currently in the throes of a major redundancy programme."
When I left HPE ES (DXC being its sickly child) we had had 26 out of the previous 28 quarters where the company had exited large numbers of people as they were "....currently in the throes of a major redundancy programme".
DXC is always in the throes of a major redundancy programme. The latest measure is hardly surprising because it is the complete norm.
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