A new job position was recently posted which overlaps my current job. This is happy news, since it should leave me with less to do. But now I do not know what entirely my job will comprise of, and whether it will become more interesting or more dull.

I am eligible to apply for the new job, and, by reason of that overlap, very qualified. But the new job is one of those remote-reporting type of jobs; the position is in one place and the supervisor is in another place states away. This increases the job’s risk of downsizing or relocation.

On the other hand, my current job, thus diminished, is also at greater risk for downsizing.

So tell me, panopticon: which door?

It is sometimes cathartic to write out dismal circumstances, and sometimes depressing. Most often it is depressing to considering writing and cathartic to do it. So I muster myself to post this, not yet having accepted the cards I’m dealt this hand.

The circle of life has turned over, like a opossum playing dead, and we are back to initiating another 100% Effort campaign to get back in the good graces of a strategic customer. The same strategic customer as last time. In fact, everything is the same as last time, except that we don’t happen to be using the same buzzwords; there is another act on center stage, and the outcome of my sideshow act has been foreseen with such penetrating insight that my actions can only constitute a charade. That’s showbusiness, but then I would like to consider my own actions amusing. If only I had a pair of magic glasses that could transform vanity to hilarity, I’d be set.

I’ve been told that we have a new account manager on the customer side, one less lenient than the predecessor who prodded us into our last initiative. Reportedly, Acme as a supplier is affecting a whole branch of our customer so that their performance looks shabby to their bosses, and to the extent that this is true it bodes very poorly for us, because there is nothing to excite rough treatment like being the scapegoat for someone’s bosses’ displeasure.

The service level this customer has set is quite a stretch for us to reach. I think we will be able to slide to a passing minimum by repeating our last strategy of do-nothing-but-make-graphs, which graphs will handily show improvements as the more severe of our current maladies cure themselves with time. At a higher level in the company, the main strategy seems to be to bicker with the customer about the accuracy and fairness of their measurements. While it is sometimes necessary to let even your customers know that you aren’t going to be bullied by their charts and figures, it strikes me as a poor way to improve the actual customer relationship. Is the customer ordering product with less than adequate time for us to deliver? Fine; rather than agreeing to deliver the product on their time at their price, and then whining because they did not give us adequate warning on what product they wanted, charge them what it costs us to deliver the product on their time. There are two basic ways we could achieve this, either by using more expensive suppliers and subcontractors or by holding a stockpile of eligible items, and either way is costly to our company. Either that, or actually reform our low-level procurement and production processes so that we can deliver the product faster… oh, sorry, the artificial sweeteners are causing hallucinations again.

As an editorial aside, it appears that a certain sugar substitute used in a certain sugarless gum causes in the author an effect not unlike mild intoxication; an ebullient mood, a certain relaxation of propriety and sobriety. The effect is not proven, having only been manifested once, and quite possibly caused by a strain of ennui more than a piece of gum; but it seemed not prudent to attempt scientific validation on the spot, on the job. Perhaps it is the answer to my prayer for magic glasses.

Since during the last campaign we showed improvement in our performance while engaging in a ineffectual ritual of phone calls and charts, and the performance dropped off again after the campaign concluded, our enterprising management has decided that what we need is a person hired full-time to make phone calls and charts. Statistical anomalies such as fluctuations in performance that occurred during the last campaign, while perfectly congruent with a “let things take their course” that was our local, unofficial, and unpublished (excepting my heretical diatribes) strategy, could be and were attributed to variations in the intensity and scrutiny and focus of those calls and charts. Thus, hiring a hit man to constantly subject the various branches of Acme to scrutiny is expected to result in ever-increasing performance.

As we open this first chapter in the second campaign, the man hired to do this job is new to the company, still learning, I’m sure, where the staples are kept and the manners, rituals, and customs of the native photocopying machines. This provides the perfect opportunity for me to develop my woefully inadequate skills in dissembling, in the hearty spirit of either blinding with brilliance or baffling with bovine excrement. I’m afraid that in my vanity and naivete I have succumbed to the temptations of the former. When he called me by phone and asked how things were conducted last time, I could not muster enough spin on the spot and so told him my honest opinion, already declaimed in these precincts. Of course, when such a sinful policy is admitted out loud, it is tut-tutted, condemned, and solemnly exorcised. What I got for my appeal for real change was a commission to design this round of charts; or more accurately, the expansive spreadsheets that presumably will be fed to the charts. And of course we are all aware of the byproducts of nutritional consumption.

I don’t know if I feel like a traitor, a harlot, or just an average pathetic pitiable fellow, for of course the first thing that’s happened is that I am obliged to fill information into this panoptic spreadsheet of cluelessness. It would be a tedious task for anyone, but since it is designed to make record of all the circumstances delaying the delivery of the products to the customer–all the undesired happenstances that afflict the procurement of raw materials and the production of finished product–it is a task best suited to the planning department, of which I am not a member and never have been. The shipping or customer service department is only responsible for getting the finished product on the way to the customer, which, I will admit, is not always done correctly. But these blemishes in delivery are not mentioned by the customer, since they are hard to notice amidst the puss-oozing sores afflicting other parts of the process.

As much fun as I am having with my vivid language, it really is true that the grossest of our offences are not regular afflictions. The symptoms will clear up, given some moderate treatment and time. Anything to permanently cure the condition will require something more like organ transplant than skin cream. Better, then, to use the cream, and assiduously point out that the customer has pimples too. But, as is usually the case with the fine grades of snake oil, for the treatment to be effected it must be carried out with devotion for months and months, and I have the job of treating the elephant’s acne.

My boss assures me that it will take hardly any of my time if I do it right, but of course, he’s never tried to rub the snake oil on this elephant. It must sting or something, because the beast won’t stand still. It’s a bothersome chore. Perhaps, though, with the right artificially sweetened gum, it could become a comedy.

As a young boy I clashed constantly with my oldest brother. I dislike being told what to do or even the way things are, especially if I am not impressed with the authority and consider myself of comparable sagacity. Without inquiring too closely of recent history, I can admit that even very late in my childhood I have refused reasonable requests and rejected valid ideas just to avoid ceding ground to this insufferable authority.

About a year ago, I was struggling to provide some kind of front-line leadership in a department where the management pro tempore was located on the other side of the building and rarely seen, and the nominal leader took care of all top priorities personally and never followed an ignored request or blatant shirking with any disciplinary action.

Since then the management gap has been filled and my highly ambiguous authoritative status has resolved to a status of respected outsider, since I am not part of the departmental hierarchy, although the working crew still baits me to take charge when they do not like what their leadership is up to.

Having played some part on both side of the line of authority, I watched the recent drama with cringing sympathy for all parties involved. The person who formerly was providing ineffective front-line leadership resigned the post entirely of her own volition. The person who succeeded her was new to the department. The departing leader knew more about the operation of the department than the new manager, or me, or the new leader; but, in character with the traits that had made her a bad leader, she did not know how to communicate what the department needed or what was generally expected of it to the new leadership. A series of mutually disappointing exchanges played out over the following months. If the old leader shared important information, she did not do it with enough emphasis, repetition, and relevant detail for the new leadership to understand its urgency, or appropriately attend to the matter. Thus the old leader and the senior members of the crew felt that the new leader was incompetent, and the new leadership (the leader and the manager) developed the opinion that the old leader was criminally negligent in passing on pertinent information.

Shortly in the tenure of the new manager, the former leader’s buddy quit in indignation. Another senior worker retired. Combined with other events, in about two year’s time this person went from being just one of the crew to the person with the most knowledge and experience of how the department worked. According to the way of nature, she was among the most skeptical of new management policies, the most convinced that the existing way was the proven best.

Like many people with sensitive self-esteem, this former leader does not like to be challenged, either in her own ideas or in her criticism of the ideas of others, and she shuts down any cross-examination with harsh self-derogatory and dismissive remarks. She has said herself that she does not like not knowing what to do and she does not like asking what to do.

Besides being new to the department, the new leader had also never been in a leadership role before. In addition to moving to a new department and taking on new leadership responsibilities, and being a mother, this person was also enrolled in college level courses–that is to say, the new leader was, and is, an overachiever. Anxious to please, driven to succeed, and not yet accustomed to the steady parade of impossible demands that management hands down, the new leader pushed her team hard and felt let down by them when they did not give their job the same desperate ultimate measure that she herself did.

I have seen an employee turn around and walk away while she was talking to them about their job responsibilities, and I saw her follow after this person to continue to deliver the instructions. The first act is insubordination and deserved discipline; the second is about the worst way of handling it, since it cedes control of the entire situation to the rebellious employee. The only time to physically chase someone is if you are going to physically beat them; otherwise, they have you on a leash. A better response would have been to stop talking, sit down, and write a report the manager who can hire and fire recommending a serious write-up or dismissal.

In the resultant friction between the new leader and the old one, the former leader has expressed her frustration through cutting remarks shared ostensibly with other employees, although not always out of earshot of the leader. This former leader even reworked the lyrics of a pop song so that they were vulgar and demeaning of the new leader’s person (not professional competence). Badmouthing the boss is not uncommon, but when you are the most senior member of the work crew and you are sharing your derisive art to the amusement of the other workers at the workplace, this is an aggression that cannot be tolerated forever.

When I was starting my position in this department, my boss told me that one of the reasons I was not going to function within the working hierarchy was because several people in the department were notoriously caustic and too rough for my unseasoned capabilities. The current leader has more seasoning in the workplace than I do, but, without any previous supervisory experience, is still facing an exceptionally tough job for a first-time leader. As often as I disagree with her method of leadership, I still recognize her genuine attempt to fulfil the responsibilities of her job rather than simply find an equilibrium between the various external demands placed upon her, as in my estimation both her predecessor and the previous departmental manager had done.

Recently, quite suddenly, the former leader was transferred out of this department to another under the same departmental manager; without her request, without warning, and under another leader whose reputation has always been almost as low as this leader’s has sunk to. Since both departments are under the same manager, he clearly has the right to transfer his employees around as he likes. But as this was done so clearly as a solution for the antagonism between the employee and the leader, this action should not have been undertaken without making it clear to the employee that her continued subversion would not be tolerated, and either firing or transfer was imminent.

Instead, because the employee’s offence could not be catalogued without sounding trivial (again, who doesn’t badmouth their boss?), the official line makes no mention of any offence at all, yet clearly punishes the employee. Because all of her friends are in this department, the employee still comes back to the same office on break times and continues to make remarks, still within earshot of her former leader, that are designed to undercut her authority; yet they cannot be easily prosecuted. It’s unconventional warfare, and I recognize it partly because I have played it myself.

If, in the course of conversation, this employee utters a commonplace obscenity, she will apologize, ostensibly to her conversant, and remark on how it is true after all, she really is a foul-mouthed person, or something of the like. Of course this is all a production for the benefit of the working leader, who is meanwhile being shunned by all of her employees. But nobody is doing anything wrong, for there is no rule against apologizing for dirty words and no rule saying you must engage your leader in conversation on break time.

So, if you are taking this to a Human Resources department, it is easy to make the employee sound nothing out of the ordinary, and the leader hypersensitive, micromanaging, and domineering. It is impossible to document the subtlety and viciousness of this attack without sounding melodramatic, unless perhaps you have the finest craft of language, but it is also obvious under direct observation.

It is easy to fault this leader. Most people, myself included, would chafe under her insistent, unrelenting style. I have a tendency toward the same excessive urgency, but I think even beyond excusing myself this fault does not deserve poisonous subversion. And yet the antagonist so fails to grasp what leadership is, and what foundations it depends on, and what responsibility to your own boss requires, that I am sure she views herself as entirely the victim, and would be honest in her own mind disavowing any campaign to politically assassinate her adversary. She would admit to disliking or hating her, but contend that it is all personal and has had no noteworthy impact on her professional conduct, since she did not once fail to do as she was told–although even here, the leader would remember things differently.

It’s a fine mess, one not easy to resolve even in hypothesis, because both parties are partly wrong and both are earnestly convinced that they are not wrong in any significant degree. I was accused by one of the other employees of “siding” with the leader, and, although the accusation was dropped because the basis was false (it was said that I would not talk to the disgraced employee, which I easily disproved since I had only been wary of whether she had concluded on her own that I was “them”). I have abundant sympathy with both sides, but I do think that the leader is in the more understandable and justifiable position–except I know I haven’t actually worked under the leader, and if I had it might change my view.

Safely ensconced as an observer, I watch with morbid fascination, dreading that this may someday be my lot. Presently I have more trepidation about the role of the leader. After all, if you are the employee, the worst they can do is fire you. As the leader, though, you might fail your own boss and your collective team.

Your boss is the one who tells you what work you must do and who authorizes your paycheck. Many people tell you to do thus and so, of course, but it remains convention that only one person is responsible for the ongoing decision to reimburse you for services rendered.

Your dotted-line boss, within Acme, is a person who as little or no influence on your day-to-day job, the decision to hire you, and your compensation. However, the dotted-line boss controls policies and larger procedures which are nominally binding on you, as a minion in a lower echelon of the same branch of service.

My boss has given me standing instructions to use any and all means to the limit of the gray area of permissibility to maximize shipments during month end. Certainly nothing illegal should be done or is condoned. However, if something is just rough–impolite, let’s say, and perhaps not something you would do on a usual basis–then it should be done in the ultimate effort expected at the end of every month (and double that at the end of every quarter, and double that again at the end of every year).

Having made those efforts, I was told first by the master planner that my method of execution was detrimental to his work. Then I was told by my dotted line boss that I did not have authority to do any part of such efforts. And then I was told by my boss’s boss to report on the effectiveness of such efforts.

I am not sure yet how it will all play out, as I am trying to force the dotted-line boss to make a play and document his policy, or else back down and leave me alone. Probably it will go right back to don’t ask, don’t tell.

Got it? Don’t tell anybody. And I didn’t tell you.

I caught up on the claims. I doubled up for three days this week and finished what I had left. But then the local accounting department got involved.

They told me that when I have a claim of short-shipment (right product, but fewer received than billed), I should use the RMA (a “return,” but in this case of something that never left; so the reversal of a transaction) to adjust the inventory. And if inventory was already adjusted, I would need to get the previous adjustment reversed, and use the RMA.

However, the accounting department will only allow one person to make those adjustments to the inventory. This one person, H.J., is not very prompt about making the adjustments in the first place (when we find that we are missing or have extra inventory, but do not yet know why). Things have been going okay just recently, after I basically threw a fit to H.J.’s boss, but the idea of increasing her workload must raise the likelihood of the adjustments not being done promptly.

On the phone with one of the Accounting minions, I said, “We can reverse the adjustments and use the RMA, but you will not be able to receive the RMA until H.J. reverses the adjustment.”

“I can’t do that,” said the accountant. “H.J. sometimes takes a while to get things done and the customer is waiting for credit. I have to book the RMA immediately.”

“Well, you can’t do that,” I said. “If we have previously adjusted in extra inventory and then you book an RMA for the same extra inventory, the system will reflect more inventory than we actually have and orders will drop against that inventory, thus telling other customers that their orders are about to ship when really they aren’t because we don’t have that stock.”

“Well, we will talk about it on Monday,” said the accountant.

So on Friday I did not process any claims, since I no longer know what I am supposed to do. I have a feeling I will lose the fight with accounting because they will just say, “H.J. should do her job promptly,” which of course sounds nice, but then it will happen as I said: besides having orders that we can’t ship because we discovered we were short, which already happens, and having to hold on to those orders for as many hours or days as it takes H.J. to get around to adjusting out the inventory, we will have more of the same where we already know exactly what happened to the inventory, but we still have orders dropping that we can’t ship.

Customers can find out if their order is about to ship. I think there is a way for them to do this online, but even if not, they can call the customer service center and those people can tell if an order has dropped for shipment. If so, they tell the customer that the order will ship, because they can’t imagine why we would have a dropped order sitting around for days without shipping it.

Of course, the simplest solution here is to allow yours truly to make adjustments corresponding to the validity of the claims. If I find that we have made a shipping error I should be able to make the corresponding adjustment. This is especially warranted given that the accountant I talked to who receives the RMA’s (inventory adjustments based on short shipment) makes these adjustments solely on the basis of my say-so. Since absolutely no further investigation is done beyond what I chose to do, I am basically adjusting the inventory already–albeit with the delay of going through another person, and without being able to do any negative adjustments.

Supposedly, there are legal (Sarbanes-Oxley) restrictions on who can adjust the inventory. Well, I should rephrase. I don’t doubt there are restrictions. Supposedly, those restrictions require that all the adjustments we need be performed by H.J. only, and I cannot be given the permissson. Of course, the accounting department found a way to give P.B. the permissions to adjust inventory when they realized it was either that or one of them would have to work weekend month-ends when Jennifer was not in to support the mania of maximizing month-end shipments. I guess Sarb-Ox has special provisions to prevent accountants from working overtime.

The day after I wrote my last post–that is, the Monday after I clocked a fourteen hour day to get this documentation for our new software done on schedule–they canceled the project. As suddenly as we began this new software implementation we ended it. Evidently when someone actually looked around at the different software in use they discovered that they would have to put together a customized interface during the transitional period while other sites were still using the old software, so we went from first on the list to last.

The man on the phone said we had gotten more done than he expected, although those of us the furthest ahead had only done what was required so urgently three days ago. And we were told to finish what we started, because the transition will still happen, eventually.

You can imagine how many places this project dropped on my priority list. So I turned again to claims, which I had kept up on well for December (and November, if memory serves), but had neglected in January. I decided that I was not going to be able to catch up day by day. A ten-day backlog of claims requires hours of devoted time. I have been trying to scale back on my overtime-as-problem-solving because it really isn’t; it is encouraging the problem by accomodating it. I had been struggling to bring the claims-processing to my eight-hour shift instead of an hour or two of overtime each day, but now I was staying an hour, or two, and not doing any claims.

Rather than pretending I would eventually get the claims done on regular time, while the backlog grew day by day, I decided to admit I had already let the problem go and come in on Saturday to clean it up. But I still let myself get up late, and mosey in to work very late in the morning. I sat down at my desk, went through my log-in routine, and realized–remembered–that IT had taken down the mother database that the sector customer service runs off of for some critical maintenance. In other words, my primary reference for all things order related was out for the weekend, and I was in.

Over this past year or so I have gradually developed my in-house resources to the point where I was actually able to answer most of the issues raised without the main database on line. There was that sinking moment when I was pretty sure I threw away my Saturday for nothing, but in the end I managed.

Now I’m down to about a three-day backlog. I think I can deal with this by doing two days of claims each day, which will mean probably two solid hours of overtime for three days, possibly all week.

Then I will be back to trying to get the claims work into my regular eight hours. That will be particularly hard now because P.B., the manager, was conscripted into being a member on this second A-Team coming in. He told his (and my) boss that he was too busy taking care of the other projects that had been placed on his lap, but he nevertheless got an e-mail on Friday from corporate HQ where our boss was hob-nobbing that he had been volunteered, to start Monday.

Probably the plant manager and other high-level staff, including aforementioned boss, will still expect him to continue tearing out his stockroom and reorganizing it in a way he does not agree with, not to mention the several other projects and basic functions of managing that he typically deals with, notwithstanding that these teams require 8+ hours of time from participants.

As perverse as that is, in my own way I am volunteering for it. Not for the same setup exactly, but I am trying to get into the Buzzword Training. This particular Buzzword Training requires, nominally, that the trainee complete projects with documented cash savings, so it seems like a good thing to get on my resume. I have discussed this with the Buzzword Manager and with my own boss, and in Q3, Q4 2007 we were all agreed that I was up for nomination in Q1 2008.

Following up on this in January, I found out that the process had changed and the Buzzword Manager no longer controlled, nor really understood, how candidates were nominated for Buzzword Training; so I sent an e-mail to the archeons of Acme Training and got some information back that my supervisor had to nominate me using the Dilbert Management Software. So I passed this information on to my boss. And then I followed up with him, to see if the information had taken hold; and he said he wanted to talk to the Buzzword Manager.

I believe this is when I am supposed to pathetically whine, “Who moved my cheese?”

My tempermant is more I’ll kill the rat who stole my cheese. You see, it’s not change I don’t like, it’s bad change. And there’s plenty of that going on.

Value-Steam mapping a electronic transactional process is dumb; Value-Stream maps are meant to show not so much what is happening as what isn’t, where work “in progress” is actually sitting around waiting to be worked on. Given large enough quantities of electronic data, it may also sit in queues and take time to process, but more generally data now moves as fast as any average person could hope to make it. The value-stream map springs from the “Just do it!” ethos of changing things in straightforward ways that most people can effect, not technical analysis for IT specialists.

Traditional process mapping,however, makes a great deal of sense when applied to computerized processes. In fact, the little detailed steps and the finer points of sequencing can be pivotal to the design of the software. So I was much happier this week to be working on process maps to facilitate the new factory software implementation than I was last week trying to puzzle out a value-stream map.

Still, there are always an abundances of necessary tasks in the office for which I am the best skilled to resolve, or fancy myself so, and I had to resolve to spend Thursday doing nothing other than the process maps. Since I did not lock myself in a room away from all the normal work, it wasn’t strictly all that I did; but you can fairly say I spent the day doing those. Maybe not all fourteen hours that I worked, but quite long enough.

It was fortuitous that I decided to spend so much time to get them done, because on Friday it was learned that Big Scary Guy (the same threatening power eliciting our sniveling compliance with every inane idea of the A-Team) was interested in the documentation our site was producing. This in turn gave our plant manager a whole new level of interest in what we were up to. So rather than putting finishing touches on the process maps, a good portion of Friday was spent explaining them to people who wanted previews before Big Scary Guy had his imperial review.

Right about when all that business was over with and I was feeling pleased with myself, someone from the customer service center contacted me on the corporate instant-messager and asked if I still reviewed the claims. I almost said that that the importance of the claims was insignificant compared to properly preparing for this software change over, but, as the rep was writing from the customer service center that will be closed in months, it hardly seemed appropriate to put on airs about the importance of, basically, her job function. If the claims still matter to someone who will be unemployed shortly, surely it would be brash for me to call them irrelevant.

Honestly, I think that the claims, having a direct affect on the customer, are empirically much more important than documents that will likely have very little effect on the introduction of a new software package. The day that was perhaps the highlight of the month for me in coporate politics was, in customer service ethics, unremarkable or dissappointing.

And how often the two do seem inverted.

The week before Christmas I was told by our multi-site IT manager that we had to upgrade our shipping software. This piece of software has no data validation and an inadequate interface that requires us to adapt fields for different uses on different shipments. Because the software does nothing to alert users to errors and because of the “Do this unless that” nature of our user instructions, every time we train someone new to run the software we experience a miserable period of errors surfacing when it is too late to fix them. But this same multi-site IT manager had gone to bat to get the software upgraded before and struck out; a particular hack critical to our use of the software was no longer supported, and nobody felt it was worth addressing.

Now I was told we had to upgrade, even though there was still no way for our crucial piece to be upgraded. Carrier rate changes were coming up that were not offered in a format compatible with our software. Upgrade, or stop using your primary freight carrier. How soon did this magic have to be worked? About mid January, I was told, so even though everything appeared to be headed straight toward a disaster that would require us to write down by hand every shipment, I didn’t panic. There was still time to investigate.

An hour or so later, the story changed. This upgrade must be done no later than December 31. It had to be done before the end of the month, before the end of the year, in that crucial period where if anything goes wrong the plant manager will personally lead the entire plant down to shipping to “help,” irregardless of whether the influx of people would necessarily help in a disaster like the loss of shipping software, because there is nothing more important at the end of the year than shipping everything we legally can.

Which is why we had already been bargaining and threatening and pleading with carriers to come in Saturday and Monday, December 29 and 31, when most other companies were going to be enjoying a holiday weekend. Depending on who within these companies you talked to, the answer was either yes or no. And no matter what, the rule from the plant controller (Accounting cheif) was anything that gets processed as a shipment must leave the property, and I don’t care if the truck doesn’t show up; it has to go.

Already fretting about whether trucks would actually show up, when I heard that we were facing a good chance of not having shipping software, I did panic. I told everyone in the office to panic too, for good measure. After all, when IT tells you that you can’t upgrade the software and still have it work, and then tells you that you must upgrade your software or it won’t be legal, and Accounting tells you that everything must be accounted for properly or it won’t be legal (and your job may be forfeit), and your boss’ boss says everything must be shipped (or your job may be forfeit), well, panic at least sets the right mood.

The IT guys and I decided to try the upgrade on Friday the 21st and see how it went. Filled with profound philosophical and religious thoughts on the ultimate meaning of life, we backed everything up and close our eyes and pushed the big red button. The software that we couldn’t upgrade was upgraded. Would it still talk to our main factory software, or was the hack broken beyond all use?

It worked fine. Absolutely fine. It still looked like the same program and worked like the same program. Unfortunately. I was left wondering why the IT guys had always said that we could not upgrade and the office was left wondering why I didn’t take a chill pill.

It’s basically the same story with the A-team, who were were told were a team of ruthless experts who would see through all our lies, catalog all our inadequacies, and fire top management and anyone else who stood in the way of righteousness and progress. Actually nobody lost their job, the team struggled to implement changes that had as many drawbacks as benefits, and within about two weeks after they left plans were already circulating to completely rework their processes.

Or when, on the last day of the month, one of the order printers went down. There are two printers and they have to work in tandem; one prints picking papers and one prints packing papers. We use some goofy paper that is half label, half plain, and always getting jammed, and this day we had the Big Jam that incapicated one of our key printers. Although all month long we assumed we would be racing around frantically busy on the last day of the year, it was actually a dull, slow day, without much being built or many orders for what we had; still, the loss of a printer was threatening to cease our operations completely. These two printers are not interchangable with any other model used in the factory. However, there was one of the models that had previoiusly been used collecting dust in the file room, and it was pressed into service will a fuser kit was ordered. It worked like an old, retired printer would work, badly, but it worked, and life went on.

Or at the end of the day, when we had a line of very large boxes and our small-package carrier’s truck was almost full. The aforementioned pleading had secured a promise for service on Saturday and Monday, but on Saturday the truck had only been removed from the premises so as to satisfy our controller’s understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Our packages were still on the same truck when it was dropped off on Monday, and if it hadn’t been an eerily slow end of month, there would have been a huge disaster. As it was, it looked like several of the 100+ lb boxes were not going to get on the back of the truck, and we were considering emergency options (like taking a couple of pickup truck loads to the consumer terminal–if it was open). I had not succumbed to full panic, but I was definitely in a state of exitement as I stormed to the front office to get pictures of the inadequacy of the truck to use as proof the next time we were pressured, nearly blackmailed, into shipping when no carriers wanted to take our freight. And of course, they all fit. If there had been one more package that size, it would have gone (against regulations) in the front of the truck, and if there had been six or so that didn’t fit I am not sure what would have happened. But they all fit.

Likewise, when I found out on Wednesday, December 19th that we had to create value stream maps of our processes by January 4th, to be used to guide critical decisions of the team that would replace our obsolete factory-wide software with the Oracle-based replacement, it appeared to be impossible. Due to the slow end of the month I was able to create something I thought adequate, or as adequate as could be expected given how inappropriate value stream maps are for transactional processes (VSM’s are designed to find dead spots in physical processes) and how little time I had. VSM’s are meant to be built from on the spot observations, which take a lot of time to gather if you are going for the entire shipping process–so my data was crude estimates.

There are a couple of more stages to this documentation, but the other teams in the factory that are supposed to be mapping out their processes show little concern over the deadlines, or the detail and accuracy of their work. We all know, even me, that this information is going to be little used; yet I still incline to view this as a critical chance to prevent even just one or two monstrosities from masquerading as features in our new software. Although our work now might be just for show and tell, the larger undertaking is something we will live with for years, not forget as soon as it is done. So it is a cause for legitimate concern, right?

On Tuesday the 18th I received an invitation to a meeting on Wednesday the 19th to discuss the implementation of Oracle software to replace our current factory software. Some of the high-level people who were part of the A-Team had assigned various people in the plant to be on teams to document critical functions of the existing system so they could be adequately replicated on the Oracle system. This Oracle implementation was not one of the projects of the A-Team, they were just announcing it as a post-script to their exploits. Not all of the people they had chosen for this documentation teams were invited to the meeting, and many who were invited, like myself, had heard nothing about it until the invitation.

In response to some of my questions, the lead presenter said, “Oh, my speciality is order management. It will be crucial for you to document how due dates and promise dates are calculated and transferred between systems,” which is partly a function of order placement, presently conducted by a sister facility that is being shut down, and the planning department–in other words, neither I nor any other members on my team know anything about it. So I asked to speak with him further. “Oh, I have been here for five weeks and now I am leaving.”

The first part of the documentation is due January 4th. That might seem a little bit of a short notice, if you think of the two days off for Christmas, but when you think that Acme is so frantic to post a big fat revenue number that they would have us working Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (New Year’s Eve), if only we could convince trucking companies to pull freight all of those days, then you can see that our mandated priorities leave us little room to work on this project until the new year. And the first day of the new year is a holiday, since, being a day later, it no longer has any bearing on the financial numbers for 2007. So it is not a somewhat short time frame to do this kind of project, it is very short.

And I figured out why. The actual IT experts will come later. This bit of documentation is only to make the actual user’s life easier by having the system tailored to our needs. Also it is possible that we might give some piece of insight that would help the IT team. But really, it is only us users who have anything to gain from this, so if we don’t have enough time to do a good job, who really cares?

Lean Production, based on the Toyota Production System, recognizes 7 wastes:

1. Transportation. Moving something from one spot to another does not make it worth more.
2. Inventory. If a miser saves all of his money, what good does it do him? If a company has more product than someone is ready to pay for, what is it worth?
3. Motion. Any kind of walking, reaching, moving, touching, searching, or other motion, which does not directly make the work in progress closer to what the customer will pay for, is a waste of time and money.
4. Waiting. When a worker waits, he is being paid to do nothing. When a product waits, it is not returning money to the company.
5. Overproduction. As long as you are making a perfect product, which will never need to be fixed, updated, or changed, and which somebody will always buy, you can make as much as you want. Otherwise you should only make as much as you can sell now, before something changes.
6. Overprocessing. If you spend time and money to put a pretty design on a part that is going to unseen inside of the finished product, you have wasted your money. Anything you do that the customer does not want is a waste.
7. Defects. If you inspect for defects and you do not find any, you have wasted time. If you find a defect, you will have to repair it or scrap the part entirely. If you have to rework a part you are paying twice for a part that the customer will only pay for once.

   The A-Team came to Acme with a mandate from on high, and scared all the management into not questioning any of their decisions. They set about with steely resolve to drastically reduce the waste of Inventory, and this they did–mainly by increasing Transportation.