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Watch out for internsIt's getting to be that time of year when companies are hiring interns. The attraction, of course, is cheap, motivated, and smart labor. However, there is a downside. Of course, you'd expect me to spot that, wouldn't you? In the last couple of days, I've heard two scary stories that ought to make you think twice about the assignments you have planned for these summer slaves. Case One I know of a company who is hiring an intern and will assign her to building the company's intranet site. The actual content will be developed by the regular employees and executives, but the technical and design work will be done by the intern. They started working on the site more than a year ago, but it has stagnated because of a lack of executive enthusiasm, budget, etc. I'm going to make a prediction here. There are going to be some problems, even if this brilliant, computer science major manages to get the site built to perfection, with little or no project management, and a complete lack of understanding about the company, by the time she returns to school in mid-August. How many Web sites are perfect one month, then have to be overhauled and re-done a month later? If this company uses an intern in the summer of 2000 to build their intranet, they'll probably find themselves waiting until the summer of 2001 to make any changes. And of course, the new intern in 2001 will not like ANY of the work done by the last one, and will simply tear it all apart and start over. Bottom line - this company is going to have a sub-standard, marginally useful, uncompetitive intranet site for years to come. All because they used an intern when they should have committed real resources. Case Two This second situation is even more disastrous. Careers were ruined, a company was embarrassed, and a more cost-effective way of accomplishing things is being ignored. All because they used an intern. The intern at a division of Company X developed, quite by accident, a method of automating a process. This procedure involved manual work, number crunching, heads-down computing, and lots of data entry. By using a pretty sophisticated Excel spreadsheet, some complicated macros and an Access database, the intern was able to come up with a system that significantly reduced the work and time required to accomplish the task. Real cost savings for this division were achieved using this intern's work. The effect was so dramatic that the division manager got the intern into a suit, convinced him to remove some of the more icky body-piercings, and took him to the home office to demonstrate his process. The division manager knew that the other divisions would also be able to see some great cost savings. The home office was impressed by the program and authorized the division manager to roll it out to all of the other divisions. He and the intern achieved some pretty high visibility in the company while training the divisions and developing the centralized database. Finally, towards the end of the summer, the rollout took place. A week later, the intern went back to school. A week after that, the system crashed, badly. Unfortunately, no one had thought much of scaleability and the special issues faced by other divisions. Of course, by then the intern was now back at school, getting more body parts pierced, and not returning calls. The division manager now had to use real employees to fix the problem. However, they weren't as familiar with Excel, and didn't understand the intern's approach, macros and scripts (surprise, no documentation). They would have had to rebuild the application from scratch - a job that took the intern an entire summer. They eventually found a consultant who was willing to do the work for an estimated $100,000, a lot more than the intern got paid. The home office threw up their hands in frustration, claimed that the division manager had overstated the cost savings, and canceled the project. Needless to say, the division manager who beat the drum for this project is STILL the division manager and will probably stay the division manager long after that intern becomes his boss. What's the message behind these stories? Use your REAL employees. If an intern, who is still in school, has skills that you need and your employees don't have, shouldn't that be ringing some alarm bells for you? Interns should not be used for critical and important projects. Unless you do some serious project management in terms of documentation and backup, you're just setting yourself up for disaster. After all, how important can a project be if you'd assign it to an intern, a resource that is guaranteed to not be around in a couple of months? Remember one of the key rules to a successful IT project. Ask what happens when the system fails. Will these people be around? Is there sufficient documentation to fix it? Is there a plan to address this failure? Wondering how to use those interns you've already committed to? Assign them to non-critical pieces of projects. Have them document the poorly written projects of previous interns. Have them proofread your Web site. You can send them out for pizza. Or better yet, have them run down to Starbucks for some latte. But whatever you do, don't let them do something important. Thanks to the pals who provided the inspiration for this article. You know who you are.
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