07/18/2005 Archived Entry: "SP"
The F&SN Critic has asked for my help editing one of his books, titled The Suicide Project. It's a fascinating tale, and one that I had some small hand in crafting. I hope I'm able to bring something useful to the project.
Found time on Friday evening to catch the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which is one of the best shows to appear in recent memory. The original one never caught my attention during my youth; having recently watched some of its episodes, I can now see why--the original show was crap. Honest, hokey, campy crap.
In a meeting today, I referred to our massive efforts to align our processes and procedures with the ITIL guidelines as "corporate masturbation". Everyone in the meeting agreed, and then there was a collective pause, and then we continued the meeting. It was rather like a bunch of hamsters all mentioning the unspeakable fact that they really aren't going anywhere on those little wheels of theirs, and then resuming their run.
It's sad that we spend so much time and effort complying with completely irrelevant processes and sets of guidelines. ISO, ITIL, OSHA Star--they're all massive time sinks. It's possible, back in the stone ages, that such certifications meant something, but now they're just meaningless lists of shit for employees to do. One of our ISO audit requirements is that we have to be able, from memory, to recite for an auditor our "Primary Quality Policy", which is that we strive to instill quality into all of our products and services at all points of the product's or service's lifecycle, for the benefit of our customers. Which, if you look at it, is a bullshit-fancy way of saying, "we try to do good". Which is the stupidest thing in the universe to have to memorize. But there you go.
We've actually reached that bureaucratic kung-fu zenith where we are able to take processes and techniques that were originally created to help people, and instead use those processes and techniques to hinder them. Like, if someone comes at me and they want me to, say, build a server for them to support a new application their department is going to buy, all I have to do is say, "Sure, just run that through the RSDI process!" That's Request for Study, Design, and Implementation. It's supposed to be a method to coordinate the requirement gathering, design, and implementation for projects, but it actually is a way to ensure that the project gets kibbitzed over, then dissected into tiny parts, then fought over by a bunch of different groups as to who's going to be responsible for what, then designed, redesigned, and re-redesigned, then abandoned because it's too expensive and by this point the customer's requirements have massively changed and they don't need the thing any more.
Remember how I said we're never going back to the moon? Yeah.
Replies: 1 Comment
Brother, that description of processes being used to hinder rather than help just described a typical day for me. It's comforting to know I am not the only one who is not able to be truly useful because of ridiculous processes that no one needs. The best part is when management pretends that we do in fact need these processes, and tries to explain them so we 'understand' what our 'core competencies' or '[insert management zombie lingo here]'.
Posted by Bejita463 @ 07/18/2005 10:38 PM CST
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