This is an interesting one. Our company has contracted with a fairly large and highly reputable solutions provider, I don’t want to mention any names but lets refer to them as ‘X’ needless to say they’re huge and have been around since the dawn of man. Their main purpose is to provide back-office functions to our company with an emphasis on efficiency.
That’s all good on paper and in theory. In practice it’s another story entirely. I wanted to title this story ‘Planning Illiteracy’, because in a way that’s really what we’re experiencing. But I don’t want to be mean so I won’t call it that.
What I find is that, once again, the wrong people are being hired for the job. Long story short and some history first, we had a single-solitary lady handle the entirety of the back office functions for us (exceptionally efficiently I might add), unfortunately there was a disagreement with some new management and she left the company, a company to which she was loyal for many years, the company now had a gaping wound and decided to heal it by contracting this big 3rd party solutions provider otherwise known as X. For lack of a better way of putting this, it was a retarded move. 6 months on, we’re no better off than we were when just one person managed the back-office functions. That doesn’t sound so bad does it? No it doesn’t. That’s all well and good until I throw this bomb into the fray – 5 people replaced the functions that this single-solitary lady was handling. Shocked? Let me repeat that, five people replaced one person and out of that five they’re doing no better than when we had one person. Does that sound right? Let me tell you, that single-solitary lady was a gem, she was efficient, she knew what she was doing and she was a pleasure to work with.
But why is this 3rd party company, codenamed X like this? Are they not pros at what they do? Have they not done this kind of stuff before? Okay, you don’t have to mention the obvious, we’re a stubborn company and we have an aversion to change, just like vampires resist the light but 6 months on you would expect an improvement.
Getting a little side-tracked. The real problem is that when X plans something, they’re doing so without including all the appropriate parties, like, the entire IT department for instance. So they go and plan something, they don’t let us know what they’ve planned and then at the last minute they realize that they’ve left out a key component such as network wiring. Or the lack thereof. They want something done but don’t think about what’s needed to get it done! What aggravates the situation, highlighting an earlier point I made is that the lead person that represents X mumbles and you often have to say “I’m sorry can you say that again.” *bangs head against wall repeatedly*
One example of many. I’m willing to bet our situation isn’t unique with similar scenarios replaying around the world in other companies. Why is this a problem? Are people unable to learn company processes? Do they suffer from short term memory loss?
Filed under: Adventures @ Work, Life | Tagged: planning illiteracy, X, xerox
I’ve heard a joke along this line before:
How many chimps does it take to change a lightbulb? However many your budget can pay for.
It sounds like ‘x’ has a plan on paper for what to do to fix your situation instead of coming in and observing what is going on and then designing a solution. My company uses Lean Manufacturing and when we go into a department or cell to change things there is always a lag because people get use to the way they are doing things and are generally unwilling to change until they are forced to, but upon seeing the physical benefits (shorter work day because more productive or monetary productivity incentives) they come on board, but generally are not vocal about their support. If I were in charge of your company I would fire ‘x’ and hire a different firm which would work with your company instead of working for your company.
In a better world, I wish they would get fired! I think the only way major change were to help is if people like you and I were running the show. These old foggies that have the titles CEO and VP don’t have a clue how to do thing’s properly. They subscribe to the old-school mentality and that’s not the direction we should be headed. We need tech-savvy individuals in management….but that’s a whole new blog entry and another can of worms.