Bruno

Discussion (4) ¬

1. 
   Kona

   August 1, 2016 at 10:31 am | #

   That’s the kind of management that gives bureaucracy a bad name. Instead of simply monitoring productivity, they try to micromanage the process.
2. 
   DWM

   August 1, 2016 at 3:50 pm | #

   I had to do that for a year once . . . spent most of my time collecting and coding the data I gathered rather than doing actual work!
3. 
   Pete Rogan

   August 1, 2016 at 10:10 pm | #

   My former company required tracking of all time in fifteen-minute increments on a wholly proprietary internally-designed tracking system with no documentation. You had to either learn from somebody else (frowned upon) or just muggle it until you had some sort of input (also frowned upon). They also did not like smart-alecs who correctly listed the hour and a half it took to fumble through the system. The perfect storm of hubris, incompetence and waste. And they could never do any better because business. After dealing with it a week, I understood why my manager had fallen off the advancement track. (Actually, it wasn’t the time system; the same management put her in charge of a customer who would not sign off on needed changes, with no authority to negotiate or to change the specs. She was, in fact, expected to be crushed in the collision between contract and customer, and so she was. Working for a broken manager was interesting in much the same way being half-devoured by a shark is interesting. Just not quite the same kind of pain)
4. 
   Edward Welbourne

   August 7, 2016 at 7:06 pm | #

   Indeed. Broken bureaucracy.

   Bureaucracies insist that they cost nothing. If you include the cost of the bureaucratic process in your reporting of the thing the process pretends to be measuring, that reveals that the process costs more than the “win” it’s supposed to gain by “optimising” the system. Under the guise of all that, it hides the fact that upper bosses (typically too far from the work supposedly supervised to understand it) don’t trust those close to the ground to do their job – almost certainly because the insecure are so because *they* know they have no clue about how to do *their* job (much less that of the “subordinate” manager), so how can they trust those “under” them to know how to do theirs ?

   In 1990ish, when The Peace Dividend let governments stop wasting so much money on preparedness for ending the world, my employer was owned by a “defence contractor” which had to downscale itself. My boss, her boss and his boss were all inside our business; the first two understood my job, the last had enough clues (and knew me well enough) to trust them. Two layers above him, in an abstract bureaucratic hierarchy An Ass issued A Directive that each of us must produce a weekly report of how we had used our time and how we had progressed towards our stated goals, relative to our projected plans. I was too naive to see that there was a tacit expectation that each of us was so desperate to keep a job that we’d lie to pretend we were keeping to plan for as long as possible to keep our jobs, so that our reports would provide That Ass with paperwork with which to cover His Ass. So, each week, I wrote a totally truthful account of project-to-plan (sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, except for …) complete with the fact of (being punctiliously diligent) taking the time to document how I took my time and then writing the report, all of which took about a half day of each week and (obviously) delayed my project by about 10%. My managers (the further up the stack you went, within the ambience of clues, the better) understood that I was sending a “kick-me” post-it up the pile for That Ass to use to cover his ass with; I did not. Fortunately, the honest naif did a right thing. I was soon to leave for other reasons (of my own; broken, rash and misguided, but that’s another story) but I aided and abetted That Ass marking himself for disposal in a later round of “We Must Shed 5% of head-count across the board” (even where I was, which had every reason to grow; which gave my local bosses the excuse to give me a healthy redundancy pay-off and then hire me back for part-time work until I found a job where my misguided reasons took me).

   Bureaucracy is endlessly comically broken; just read Dilbert. I spent a short time in that universe and can only laugh at it (those who escape it find that easiest). Thankfully, most of my industry is less broken than that; but most of The Corporate World is so. Perhaps that is A Good Thing; if it is pervasive enough, the folly shall destroy itself. Certainly, in my (rather archaic part of the software) industry, those competent at what we do survive such errors, while our peers (and thus sometimes their future bosses) learn to mistrust those who actually cause them.

   Sadly, most folk who live with such broken management (as illustrated here) are the victims of their bosses’ incompetence; and it is the victims that get blamed (and sacked – or that don’t get their contracts renewed, when they’re hired on short-term contracts that are specifically designed to let bad bosses do this) while the bosses persist in their positions and keep the system broken. This Needs Fixed. (Also: the victims of this deserve hugs.)