| Thursday, December 01, 2005 |
| Dilbert Imitates Life |
Good comedy is rooted in reality. And I believe that is why Dilbert has been so popular. Let me share a ridiculous situation here at work as an example of management gone awry--or at least retro--to drive the point home:
At work (you know, the cover job to hide my superhero identity?) I order parts for an automobile component. I have three co-workers and a supervisor. Together, we have about 30 different companies that supply roughly 300 different parts. We order parts to deliver just-in-time. During any given week, at least one or two suppliers are past due because of material or production problems. Until last week, we tracked these critical parts individually and reported problems to our supervisor if we anticipated a dilemma. But thanks to a new vice-president of purchasing, we have a new method.
The new vice-president devised this marvelously 1980s, time-consuming, almost technology-free plan. He directed my supervisor to hang a new 4-foot by 8-foot dry-erase board in his office with various column headings such as "Part Number," "Quantity," and "Date Due". My supervisor has to update this board every morning to track the parts. You can imagine how much we hate the board because it has added work to fix a problem that didn't exist.
Here's the kicker: My supervisor then has to take a digital photo of the board and email it to the vice-president! I almost laugh every time I think of the VP squinting at his computer screen trying to decipher the bad handwriting in a grainy picture of the board. It's ironic that my supervisor has requisitioned a brand new $400 digital camera here at year-end when all of the salaried employees' cost reduction ideas are due. But, you can only imagine how puffed up the VP is about his wonderful stone-age idea.
This morning as we all met in my supervisor's office I recommended that we could eliminate that silly board by sharing a spreadsheet on the shared network drive and use Excel's "track changes" option. That way everyone in the department would be able to update it throughout the day; and at any given moment, the VP could view it from his desk. You should've seen the blank looks!
Who knows? The whole problem could be rooted in the fact that the VP doesn't have a computer but a Etch-a-Sketch. Hmm?
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posted by Joe Napalm @ 11:21 AM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Wow, this is worse than I thought. It sounds like you are knee deep in a classic case of corporate hades.
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Wow, this is worse than I thought. It sounds like you are knee deep in a classic case of corporate hades.