Well, you have March Madness and then we have IT madness.
What I have seen in service organizations and their IT departments can only be described as legendary. There is a certain arrogance about the attitude from IT departments. Some of the smartest people . . . that do the dumbest things.
But it is not their fault, it is a function of the system that creates IT.
Budgets and schedules rule service organizations and nothing could be more true than with IT. IT builds to schedules and budgets forgetting the original purpose of IT. The end product is predictably nothing good.
For example, a study done with an IT department revealed that the front-line had over 200 clicks, 50 free form fields and about 25 drop down choices to place an order. In and of itself this isn't a problem, until you discover that most of the activity is waste - cutting and pasting, and fields that don't progress the order or provide any useful purpose.
The mantra is . . . if front-line workers would just follow the written procedure, "everything would be fine." However, the procedures are written (with best intent) myopically. Workers are left to figure out whether customer demands fit the procedures . . . and they don't - it is like taking a multiple choice test where you have 4 good answers, but one best choice. The real problem is that workers lack knowledge about how to progress the order. This is why "just following the procedure" is ignorant and costly. My next article at Quality Digest is titled "Just Follow the Procedure" and should be out this week.
The waste doesn't end here as IT becomes reactionary to the problems associated with releases of new software and bug fixes. t is to make American Toast, "you burn, I'll scrape." This method has become so engrained to the way software is developed and maintained that IT departments are blind to it and the waste it causes - it is considered normal. The fixes are more testing (which is costly), not better design of development work or the work itself and thinking.
Clean-up in IT after a new release is called things like "teething pains" and "growth pains." Everyone has accepted it as just part of the process . . . it doesn't have to be that way, it is a choice to accept waste and mediocrity or worse. As Dr. Deming told us, "it is not necessary to change, survival is not mandatory."
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