F International


F International was a British freelance software and systems services company, founded as Freelance Programmers in England in 1962, by Dame Stephanie Shirley; she was involved in the company until she retired in 1993. The company was renamed in 1974 to F International. In 1988 the company was renamed again, to The FI Group, and later as Xansa plc. Xansa plc was acquired by the French company now known as Sopra Steria in 2007.

History

Founding

F International was founded in 1962 when successful female entrepreneurs and freelance working were rare. Steve Shirley started the company despite having no capital or business experience, to escape the constraints of working as a woman in a predominantly male working context:
The total revenues for the first 10-month tax year were £1,700.
The Cranfield School of Management undertook a study of the reported differences between male and female entrepreneurs in the late 1980s, concluding that because of the differences in context and background for men and women, the principal factor for successful women entrepreneurs was the nature of market entry. F International is an early example: business and industry were short of computer-skilled people, and the nature of much software and systems work was, even at that time, amenable to homeworking.
The company, then known as "Freelance Programmers", was registered on 13 May 1964 and a "panel" of freelance software and systems specialists, almost exclusively female, began to work for the company. An early assignment came from Urwick Diebold and this attracted attention from the media. The early days were difficult; at one point Kit Grindley, a recent acquaintance at Urwick Diebold, wrote Steve a cheque for £500 to cover operating costs and payments to the workforce. Once over the early cash flow problems the business began to grow. By 1966, there were about 75 regular freelance workers on the panel, some of whom became significant role players as technical experts and project managers. Seriously problematic projects were rare, but one in particular, with Castrol, forced the management team to focus on quality management. Quality management became one of the foundations of the operating model for the company.
At the start, in the 1960s, there were no accessible data communications services and no Internet, but in the 1970s the business attracted interest from academics and futurists as an example of what became known as teleworking or telecommuting. The Harvard Business School documented the F International business in a number of case studies. The business was the subject of several other international academic studies of homeworking.

Early history

In the 1970s the company's development paralleled the emergence of feminist thinking and the consequent awareness and pre-occupation with gender equality; together these led to legislation in the United Kingdom that was intended to bring equal rights to women but had unexpected consequences; F International was specifically offering employment to women, and therefore they had to adjust their policies to be gender-independent.
Despite these issues, the business continued to grow until the 1970s, when it encountered difficulties for at least two reasons: the business reported its first financial loss and suffered its first significant personnel loss, when Pamela Woodman resigned to form Pamela Woodman Associates, working in direct competition to Freelance Programmers. However, by the end of the decade, revenue had risen to £2.5m and there was a partnership with Heights Information Technology Services Inc in the United States, F International ApS in Copenhagen, servicing Scandinavia, and F International BV in Amsterdam, servicing the Benelux countries; At home, still in the 1970s, spin-off businesses were re-absorbed into the parent business which was re-established in 1974 as "F International".
By 1980 the business had developed country-wide coverage with more than 600 staff. The administrative headquarters for the UK were then based in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, where the original organisation, Freelance Programmers had been founded.
F International was a founder member of the Computing Services Association, and was active in the British Computer Society and the Institute for Data Processing Management It was in the early 1980s that a wider general interest in home working with telecommunications support became evident, a phenomenon that later known as teleworking or telecommuting.

The middle years - Timeline

Key dates in the 1980s-1990s include:
As the 1990s opened, the company made several strategic acquisitions, for example AMP Computer Recruitment in 1990 and the Kernel Group in 1991, with the objective of providing clients with staffing and training services. In 1997, IIS Infotech Limited, an Indian computer services company based in New Delhi was acquired, joined in 1999 by a small London-based project management and IT consultancy group and in 2000 by Druid, a Reading-based software consultancy.
In March 2001, now a substantial and international business with over 6,000 employees, a market capitalisation of £1.2bn and projected sales for the coming year of £515m, the company announced that it was going to change its name to Xansa plc.

Philosophy and method of working

The founding idea at F International was to provide meaningful home-based employment for young mothers with software skills, and later for "people with dependents unable to work in a conventional environment".
Although for the first decade the F International workforce communicated successfully on a daily basis, using the United Kingdom overnight first class mail service, home working became increasingly interesting and increasingly accepted as telecommunications services became available. The F International story attracted extensive public and professional interest, for example in Tomorrow's World, and books by Ralf Dahrendorf, Alvin Toffler, Michel Syrett, and Francis Kinsman. Steve herself continued to write and speak about the business model and the benefits for the workforce.
In his book "The Third Wave" Alvin Toffler included a Chapter on "The Electronic Cottage" wherein he quotes from a 1971 report by the Institute for the Future suggesting a range of occupations that could be undertaken from home, and mentioning F International as one example. Toffler wrote :
In a book concerning adapting to change in the world of work Michel Syrett summarised some of the particulars of working with F International:
More recently Steve Shirley has observed that the F International way of working presaged many features of the gig economy: flexibility, variable remuneration for different modes of working, and a high level of self-reliance. Comments from Ralf Dahrendorf support this idea. When he addressed the question: 'Has Britain got a future?', he said:

Working standards

As well as a Quality Manual there were ten other management manuals dealing with: quality policy, project management, estimating, and technical standards for general work, consulting work, systems design, software documentation, software testing and configuration management. The commitment gained from individuals who took direct responsibility for their own work, working by themselves at home, led to significant productivity gains of more than 40% when compared to conventional software and systems businesses. This was underpinned by the early focus on estimating and costing projects accurately in advance; there were sound systems in place to monitor progress, costs and quality.

Innovation and outreach

Some aspects of the company's technical work on standards and methods were published in technical journals and presented at international conferences. Senior technical staff and management contributed to technical journals and conferences concerning issues such as management
measurement techniques methods of systems analysis
, maintenance,
strategy and standards.
The paper by Calow on maintenance is particularly interesting, because it explains how a strategy was devised to manage the maintenance of legacy systems, freeing mainline systems development staff to undertake productive work and significantly reducing the frequency of bugs and systems failures; this was a key feature of the F International strategy at the time.