Outsource my control room – never! writes Marcus Kerr of Gallinet.
When I ran a successful guarding company my control rooms were critical to the smooth running of the company! So if I was so opposed to outsourced control rooms then, why do I advocate them now? My guarding company had regional offices across the UK and Ireland and two control rooms, (in London and Birmingham). I viewed these facilities to be such a critical part of my business that I would never consider out-sourcing these under any circumstances. I know that many companies share such a view, so why change? What has changed to make me such a convert of outsourcing? It certainly wasn’t the financial advantages from outsourcing. Accountants might champion the obvious significant benefits, but from an operations background it took more than money to make me change my mind.
Control itself
When Gallinet started monitoring its very first client, a national manned guarding company employing over 500 employees, I was prepared for all of the difficulties that go with a busy control room when my out-sourced company was set up, but strangely I noticed things seemed to run a lot smoother than normal. The processes, procedures and most importantly the actual controllers were unchanged so something less tangible was at work; it took a few months to fully understand what had changed. Control itself was different. The function of a control room is often not best described with the use of the word control at all, it actually controls very little of the operation after all. What it must control is information, to allow those actually responsible for the operation, the supervisors and the operations managers, to make informed decisions with the most accurate information delivered without bias and with a sense of urgency. The process of scheduling shouldn’t be a full time undertaking, either; my experience was that the majority of assignments could be rostered ahead for several months, those enjoying a stable team on site whose schedule changed so infrequently that only instances of the occasional sickness or leave required management intervention. Even then more often than not the staff on site organised things and covered each other.
Then there were the others; client requirements so ad-hoc in their nature or staff so unpredictable you are hard pressed to know with certainty who will be on duty in two days time – they are, thankfully, usually in the minority. Even taking into account the messy ones it is hard to fully occupy a 336 control, most hours are spent answering telephones to simply hear “check call”, tick a box, rinse and repeat – hardly fully productive and few in-house control rooms are genuinely revenue generating in and of themselves.
How it’s different
So, how is an outsourced operation different? Specifically the changes I noted were in the functions of the control room, no longer are the controllers the schedulers, this function being undertaken by either on-site supervisors or by operations managers out on the road (surely where they belong?) using on-line scheduling systems such as our own PeopleHours system, allowing them to adjust schedules to their hearts content or to react to last minute requirements or staff shortfalls just as efficiently as if they were sat at their desks. Furthermore many of the clients for whom we replaced an in-house operation chose (in my view rather sensibly) to reinvest some of the cost savings in providing more out of hours on the road, and more importantly, on site supervision, a Duty Manager being the most common title, clients must surely value such a position more highly than a person sat at a desk? With this organisational structure the controllers do become the discoverers and reporters of issues, they are the hub, maintaining a record of what has happened, who has been told and what the results of actions taken have been, even if they themselves are not taking that action.
So what other advantages does an out-sourced control room have over a normal control room? Let’s look at the other traditional control room functions, check calls and unbiased reporting:
Communications
Communications from officers (on, off, check calls and incidents): controllers can sometimes be guilty of assuming something is OK, from an officer arriving on assignment as required to a missed check call. It isn’t necessarily the case that the controller is confident that all is well nor is he just being lazy in not making the calls he should make to ascertain the facts. It’s more often the case that he doesn’t make the call for fear of what they are going to discover, and then become responsible for, at the other end. An out-sourced controller is immune from this fear, for whatever is discovered the obligation is to simply report it accurately and quickly to the company representative who is tasked with the operation, the duty manager or the mobile supervisor? Yes the controller will continue to assist, record, provide information and make calls as directed but crucially he doesn’t own the problem. This controller is now fearless.
Unbiased reporting
Not sharing a direct employer and not having ever worked with any of the staff based on assignments the outsourced controller is free from any bias or peer pressure. No officer arriving late for duty is ever going to coerce the outsourced controller that 1920 hours is actually 1900 hours, nor is an officer going to be successful when suggesting that he doesn’t need to make his check calls as scheduled throughout the night. The outsourced controller’s responsibility is to simply record and report the facts as they are, without comment or emotion, regardless of its content. My favourite client quote: “I like it when I ask your controllers a question, as I get the truth, not what they think I want to hear.” it isn’t the case that our controllers at Gallinet’s are inherently more honest than others, but it is the case that the truth often hurts, but not for our controllers, good news or bad, they just report what’s what. Yes the controller serves the site staff, but he works for the managers.
Business continuity
Everyone would like a control room with multiple redundant features, an automated telephone system which can receive and process 400 calls a second which enjoys connections from three separate providers, both via land-lines and VoIP services alike. For most companies it’s never going to happen. For an outsourced control room that set up has to be the norm. Business continuity and disaster contingency is an increasing requirement for control rooms. It’s a significant cost for something that everyone hopes will never be used, get this wrong and a crisis really can be a disaster for your company. It’s really expensive to do well and an outsourced control room is going to be very thorough here as it has its focus on these matters specifically. Indeed I’m writing this article while at home and from here, if required, I can provide all the services that my controllers are delivering to my clients. I can make and answer calls from staff using dedicated lines, I can monitor book on calls received, or not, and I can see all assignment and staff details. I can even run the company’s payroll via our PeopleHours on-line system or review staff training, assignment instructions, employee qualifications or SIA expiry dates, to name a few. The UK’s horrible flooding in 2007 provided us with an example of this level of business continuity when one of our customers lost their building to several feet of river water. The MD simply instructed all staff to work from home using Gallinet’s PeopleHours service, HR departments continued to function as did payroll and accounts while ops managers continued to schedule their contractual obligations and file their reports as they would had they had access to their office. Tere was a level of inconvenience experienced by the company’s staff, it would be foolish to suggest it was all completely ideal; however their own clients and staff were blissfully unaware that any level of disruption was being experienced at the other end. Isn’t that the definition of continuity? The year after when heavy snowfall was experienced across the UK, having the benefit of the flood experience, this same client instructed his staff to again work from home, choosing not to even ask them to risk the journey. He knew he could and he knew the business wouldn’t suffer, and more importantly he knew his clients wouldn’t either – not that many of them managed to get into work anyway!
At Gallinet we have taken this level of disaster recovery to the next level, we call it Disaster-Ready. Clients can operate their own control facility (despite my efforts to convince them otherwise) but with a single mouse click they can transfer their control room and all its functions to our outsourced service with our professional controllers instantly becoming aware via their systems of all operational matters and calls due. Such a service can of course be invoked when in-house facilities become unavailable through natural disasters, or, simply when a controller calls in sick, or takes annual leave. This sort of ad-hoc switch on and off outsourcing on demand provides unprecedented choice to company that wants, what they see, as the best of both worlds. It also allows us to show them the sky won’t fall in should they choose to outsource, if only for a day or an hour even. It would be unfair to suggest that it’s all plus points, there are some cons, aren’t there always? However the perceived pluses from a fully in-house operation can be the result of things that a control room should never be doing anyway, allowing expertise to develop based on soft knowledge, undocumented matters relating to assignments or officers that can result in individuals (not positions) to become seen as irreplaceable. Where an operation is documented correctly the outsourced controller can perform just as well, he has access to all the information and instructions that he needs to truly provide the function. So, at the top of this article I explained that I wouldn’t have engaged such services when running my own manned guarding company, would I now? With the benefit of five years of observation, absolutely I would, outsourcing control doesn’t mean losing control, it really means gaining it.
