Getting a Return on Judgment

The financial meltdown showed the limits of bureaucracy. Recovery depends on how well companies adopt the practices of personalization instead.

by Julian Birkinshaw and Huw Jenkins

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The article above took the words out of my mouth, where bureaucracy creates moral and emotional detachment to actual outcome, elimination of personal accountability and situations such as "communally approving" hanky panky covered under the guise of governance.

Indeed personalization of accountability is key.

How to Make Friends and Move Around Paperwork

A colleague made this observation that rules were created to manage exceptions that occurs only 5% of the time while crippling proven everyday processes. If we were to abide by each and every process; nothing would ever move.

So you almost always have to intervene, make friends with the approving authorities and talk it over a cup of coffee.

The gauntlet of procedures, processes, ISO standards and Audit tasks now controls the organization rather than work for it. Why should we even bother with processes then considering that it’s easily side stepped through “relationship”? Adding salt is the fact that through relationships, most of the heinous business crimes are committed; remember Enron and MCI-WorldCom anyone?


So maybe processes need to be replaced by cold heartless computers. No negotiations, just binary Yes or No.

The root cause however, does not lie in the paperwork, but the people running it. Dark Managers being evil, sadistic creatures take root and dig deeper than barnacles to entrench positions while edifying red tape to the stature of Holy Scripture with the CEO being God. I mean, think of it this way, scripture says; Thou Shall not Kill, but it’s OK to kill when God tells you so.

Seriously, why do we put up procedures due to listing requirements? Shouldn’t it happen by default? And why do we complain about it once we have the processes up online like it’s a disease that you inflict on yourself knowing that you don’t have a condom.

It a choice ladies and gents; rule like leaders, or have the rules rule you

Governance - Dark Management Style

After working with Governance or Councils or Committees for the last 5 odd years. It dawned on me that perhaps there's a deeper meaning to the purpose of these proceedings:-

1) When any hanky panky needs to be done "officially"
2) To stop any other hanky panky that is not your own
3) To make decisions backed by articles prepared by preferably institutions that are based in US or UK (does not matter that the study is conducted on only American or British soil exclusively). As long as the recommendations are "backed" by those study, somehow responsibility for the decision making is absolved.
4) To ensure that all traceability of accountability does not stick to the governance body.
5) where possible, to deny any initiatives because its better to be safe than sorry.
6) To make decisions that are for the benefit of the Governance/Council/Committee members and hardly ever for the business
7) To pretend that they care only when there is a user representative.

It's also typically manned by folks that are over the hill; the type that just can't get promoted or transferred anywhere else cause nobody really wants them.

I know, its not a funny or sarcastic post... i'm just pissed.

ISO/CMMI/ITIL/BPM... WTF!

If you're old enough; you'd probably remember the whole TQM hype popularized by Japan's miraculous recovery post 2 nuclear bombs and WW2. Here's the thing that management sold in the 60s through to the 80s, that Edward Deming was the guru behind their recovery with the adoption of Deming's Quality philosophy~ Plan->Do->Check->Act yada2...

Here's my take -> pure hogwash! The Japanese as a culture have always been perfectionists and they conquered China while Deming was still pushing papers in university. They even booted the Russian during the Russo-Japanese war circa 1904-05.

So why all the hullabaloo on Deming? Simple; cause he's a Whiteman in Asia (See Halo Effect) and you know what they say about the victor stating history as they see fit. Anyway, fast forward a couple more years and TQM turned into the many ISO variations, British Standards, ITIL, CMMI the list goes on. The latest being "Business Process Management" and "Enterprise Architecture"

In a nutshell, you define all the organization's key processes within its value chain in bringing products and services to the customer; tracking the transformation from raw material to valuables. While doing so you measure the performance of these processes and "optimize" it as you find bottlenecks and weaknesses.

Problem is, what typically happens in Asia is this:-

1. A 60 page (Asians write poorly so they try to keep it short) document that does not get updated or "optimized" even if it takes 9 months to replace a notebook for the customer. It's either the vendor's fault or the customer filled the requisition forms incorrectly.
   
   
2. A flow document that has RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) roles defined which does not exist in the organization
   
   
3. Everyone goes into a spree of documentation, the team lead gets promoted; then nobody knows what to do with it next.
   
   
4. Every six months, the head of Governance proclaims that the company has moved from CMMI level 3 to 4 then 5. They have a huge party; but it still takes 9 months to replace the said notebook.
   
   
5. The operations team dream up random numbers to incident reports just to fulfill the process criteria.
   
   
6. Folks get shipped to expensive overseas training on the subject only to be transfered 6 months later cause another department is short of staff.
   

The result of which are fancy websites with process flows and documentation that is as far from reality as the Sales Manager's quarterly predictions. So why do Asian organizations still persist in achieving such certifications?

Simple, cause dark managers are running riot in the company; and there's nothing like process documentations that get thrown at you like it's the Torah. A bureucrats wet dream is to attain ISO certification; and when you have ISO, ITIL and CMMI together; it may as well be an orgy.

p/s: The US Department of Defense Enteprise Architecture Documentation is well over 1,000 pages.

Bureaucracy

I like to think of bureaucracy as the dark manager’s ultimate arsenal. It gives you the “power” to deny just about everything. Here’s a list of bureaucratic bullets ready to fire:-

1. Charge Code.
Awesome weapon, not only does it shoot down things coming your way, but it’s really NOT your fault, because the finance department needs it.

2. Approval from the CEO
Because it’s so darn hard to get to him

3. Approval from the customer’s CEO, General Manager, prior to your CEO.
Go boy, good luck on that!

4. Approval from the Project Manager, the Head of Department, the Security Analyst, The Security Head, the Security Governance Stamp.
This is what we call the approval loop of death, because typically, the Security Governance Head never see eye to eye with the Security head. Heck, both of them think they’re better than each other. Due to ego, they won’t sign until the other does!

5. Forms
Forms used to be powerful, but because of all the e-fying going on, it’s loosing it’s power

6. Cryptic E-Forms
Now that’s the way to go! E.g Notes Id Canonical Value, Email Domain, Department Charge code