Corporate culture takes many forms, but genuine narrative traditions are rare. At Shatterproof Glass and my last employer, folk tales formed in irrational environments where management occasionally acted in ways that benefited employees. The paternalistic company produced a trickster tradition to explain the old man who ran the company, while the caste bound company fomented a conspiratorial belief that any incompetent who survived did so only because he, or she, had the goods on someone.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 1 - Graffiti
Graffiti represents the failure of the state in its most fundamental roles. Cities fail the young when they give them no vested interest in the community, then fail the adults when they refuse to protect their property.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Gambling - Part 1 - Racing
Racing is controlled chaos; Detroit automakers are mature organizations that banished anarchy decades ago.
They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.
They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.
GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.
Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.
But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.
Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.
Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.
In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.
Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.
When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.
After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.
Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.
Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.
New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.
The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.
When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.
When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.
The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.
Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.
They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.
They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.
GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.
Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.
But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.
Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.
Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.
In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.
Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.
When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.
After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.
Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.
Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.
New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.
The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.
When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.
When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.
The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.
Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Failure - Part 3 - Sociology
Plans to manage failure always mystify me. When I was told 80% of the data processing systems were never completed, I wondered where the numbers came from. The manufacturing shops were I’d worked were too small to tolerate that level of performance.
Shatterproof Glass could never afford trained programmers. When it needed computer systems, it tested some clerks and taught the ones with the most aptitude. They wrote the payroll and accounting systems from scratch, and people always got paid.
When I was there, it needed to modify most of its programs because the size of our part number had changed. It was the 1970s when car windows were introduced in new colors like gray and manufacturers were experimenting with thinner glass to reduce weight. The existing industry standard code no longer worked.
The only reason that project failed was the owner forced a strike by office workers, then moved the plant to North Carolina.
Mark Controls near Chicago had some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. When they needed to replace their computer systems, the project manager worked with key managers to develop a list of key reports and functions. They found the best answer was a commercial package used in another plant.
Once they started work, they had everything operating within six months. That was despite the company president who reacted to Wall Street downgrading its recommendations for the company stock by cutting costs. Where two programmers were supposed to do the work with a project manager, now it was only two working unpaid overtime. The other programmer wasn’t let go; my time was simply charged to existing projects so that new system costs were reduced.
Between Shatterproof and Mark Controls, I worked for a company that failed to implement IBM’s Copics manufacturing management system. Unlike the other companies, the central office was separated from the manufacturing plants. Any implementation planning meetings required travel, which limited them to upper managers who probably had other priorities when they visited the home office.
Our DP manager took to sleeping on a sofa in the lounge to develop an implementation plan, while the rest of us sat around for days doing nothing. The average programmer tenure in that period was 6 months. In the end, the company cancelled the project and outsourced the DP functions.
One other place I worked implemented new systems despite the owners. The project leader wanted his team to assess general requirements. The owners refused to wait, and asked another programmer to write on demand. Then, the owners fired the DP managers, and left the rest of us to rewrite the code they had ordered. At least we had some idea how it should function and could convert it into something more flexible. Turnover there was soon high.
In my last job, the IS department implemented major applications twice in ten years, once when I began and again for the magical year, 2000. Each was successful; most of the users were the same. Even though few were left from the original programing staff, continuity existed within the company.
The third new installation occurred after the contract changed hands and new managers distrusted the hardware they inherited, especially after the manufacturer stopped supporting some of it. Since there was no business justification, they couldn’t get funding for better applications, and so settled for continuing the same service with a different generation of computers.
The new managers didn’t trust the employees they’d inherited and so kept the implementation planning to themselves. Experienced users and programmers were deliberately kept out of the process, so the new company could do it its own way.
It wasn’t a failure, like the Copics experiment, but it satisfied no one. People were not willing to give their time to reimplement what they already had, and so reinforced the IS managers’ decision that his goal was to install everything then let users define what was missing later.
Looking back, failure has not been endemic and it has not been random and it has not been 80%. It correlated with the social structure of the company. Projects were more successful when managers, programmers and users were in the same area and could talk with one another. In those situations programmers developed a sense of how the business operated and could interpret the sometimes vague comments of the users. People at the same level learned one another’s weaknesses and needs.
In places where small group interactions could not exist projects were more likely to fail. The reasons varied: in one place, users were physically separated, in another owners didn’t want underlings to understand the business. More often, companies fear employees who socialize and do everything they can to discourage what they see as time wasting gossip that might be about them.
Companies who distrusted their employees were the ones who thought about managing failure because they continually experienced it and, unwittingly, perpetuated it.
Shatterproof Glass could never afford trained programmers. When it needed computer systems, it tested some clerks and taught the ones with the most aptitude. They wrote the payroll and accounting systems from scratch, and people always got paid.
When I was there, it needed to modify most of its programs because the size of our part number had changed. It was the 1970s when car windows were introduced in new colors like gray and manufacturers were experimenting with thinner glass to reduce weight. The existing industry standard code no longer worked.
The only reason that project failed was the owner forced a strike by office workers, then moved the plant to North Carolina.
Mark Controls near Chicago had some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. When they needed to replace their computer systems, the project manager worked with key managers to develop a list of key reports and functions. They found the best answer was a commercial package used in another plant.
Once they started work, they had everything operating within six months. That was despite the company president who reacted to Wall Street downgrading its recommendations for the company stock by cutting costs. Where two programmers were supposed to do the work with a project manager, now it was only two working unpaid overtime. The other programmer wasn’t let go; my time was simply charged to existing projects so that new system costs were reduced.
Between Shatterproof and Mark Controls, I worked for a company that failed to implement IBM’s Copics manufacturing management system. Unlike the other companies, the central office was separated from the manufacturing plants. Any implementation planning meetings required travel, which limited them to upper managers who probably had other priorities when they visited the home office.
Our DP manager took to sleeping on a sofa in the lounge to develop an implementation plan, while the rest of us sat around for days doing nothing. The average programmer tenure in that period was 6 months. In the end, the company cancelled the project and outsourced the DP functions.
One other place I worked implemented new systems despite the owners. The project leader wanted his team to assess general requirements. The owners refused to wait, and asked another programmer to write on demand. Then, the owners fired the DP managers, and left the rest of us to rewrite the code they had ordered. At least we had some idea how it should function and could convert it into something more flexible. Turnover there was soon high.
In my last job, the IS department implemented major applications twice in ten years, once when I began and again for the magical year, 2000. Each was successful; most of the users were the same. Even though few were left from the original programing staff, continuity existed within the company.
The third new installation occurred after the contract changed hands and new managers distrusted the hardware they inherited, especially after the manufacturer stopped supporting some of it. Since there was no business justification, they couldn’t get funding for better applications, and so settled for continuing the same service with a different generation of computers.
The new managers didn’t trust the employees they’d inherited and so kept the implementation planning to themselves. Experienced users and programmers were deliberately kept out of the process, so the new company could do it its own way.
It wasn’t a failure, like the Copics experiment, but it satisfied no one. People were not willing to give their time to reimplement what they already had, and so reinforced the IS managers’ decision that his goal was to install everything then let users define what was missing later.
Looking back, failure has not been endemic and it has not been random and it has not been 80%. It correlated with the social structure of the company. Projects were more successful when managers, programmers and users were in the same area and could talk with one another. In those situations programmers developed a sense of how the business operated and could interpret the sometimes vague comments of the users. People at the same level learned one another’s weaknesses and needs.
In places where small group interactions could not exist projects were more likely to fail. The reasons varied: in one place, users were physically separated, in another owners didn’t want underlings to understand the business. More often, companies fear employees who socialize and do everything they can to discourage what they see as time wasting gossip that might be about them.
Companies who distrusted their employees were the ones who thought about managing failure because they continually experienced it and, unwittingly, perpetuated it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)