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The State of Process – The Process State – politicalbetting.com
The State of Process – The Process State – politicalbetting.com
Understand procedure, understand warUnderstand rules, regulations
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The DfE became the department that knows next to nothing about education.
That is of course bullshit.
The words 'next to' have somehow inserted themselves to suggest, wrongly, that the DfE know something about education.
Not particularly my cup of tea musically, but here it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWa8mhYLFt4
Edit: nope, 4th. Have to LOL at Chelski 1-3 Wolves.
I am, unfortunately, a cynic.
Something that is far easier and produces a great soundbite is "we have reduced the number of administrators by a quarter!"
Always popular. Get rid of the beancounters and paper-shufflers. Easy savings. Tea and medals and the adulation of an adoring public.
Unfortunately the amount of administration is either unchanged or increased. So instead of admin assistants, the social workers, surgeons, teachers, and so on end up having to do it and we end up with them spending even less time at their primary job (and taking longer to do the paperwork than a specialist and doing it worse).
We see this, call for change, and someone reacts by reducing the number of remaining administrators by a quarter...
Actually addressing the process as you call for would be the solution. But take longer and require investing time and resources to analyse the processes and then pay to have them changed. Far easier to simply fire a few existing administrators and load up the social workers and doctors with a bit more of the paperwork. After all - who sees that bit beyond the front-page savings in reduced admin staff?
You do need to be the master of the process and not its slave however.
When there is a pressing problem process just gets set aside. Russia built the Kerch bridge in 2 years, 18 miles long, the biggest bridge in Europe, and it still stands despite the various attempts to blow it up in the current war. We cold do with adopting a similar attitude to things like climate change and housing.
Bleakness upon bleakness
Where UK does better IMO is online... many many things can be done online much more easily than when I have to interact with other govts.
Change becomes increasingly difficult as organisations grow larger and older.
But this time its about Germany.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68181799
Doubtless some Germans are blaming Olaf Scholz for their local market struggling or because a single minimum wage doesn't provide affluent living for a family of six.
And similar pieces could be done about all developed countries.
But moaning about things or blaming governments for not providing everything demanded isn't going to achieve anything anywhere.
The way to improvement is through work not whining, through increasing productivity not increasing demands, through taking the opportunities on offer not expecting others to provide more.
Successful investment is also difficult and usually requires the same things.
Much easier to keep doing the same things, hope problems disappear and pay yourself another bonus.
Think of them like electron shells. Each layer expands but it becomes progressively more difficult to jump to the next one. This third "Ydoethur" phase in PB Cosmic Evolution is analogous to the d-block: the articles are rusty, metallic, and go "clang" when you strike them. The articles will be bigger on the inside than on the PB outside, which is only logical when you consider the name.
A related issue to all this is "measurement". I think we could usefully do a bit less of this. Eg you should not normally spend more time/money measuring how big of a problem something is than you do in resolving it. Yet we often do. Also the very act of measuring something can change it and so you are likely to get a false reading.
The examples I know something about from your list - Boeing, Horizon etc - the root cause is poor culture in those organisations. In general organisations with good culture have effective processes, but not necessarily fewer of them. I can think of processes the Post Office would have benefitted from, including a proper escalation process for people raising concerns.
Sometimes change for change's sake becomes a fetish. Perhaps tinkering would be a better word, but having Changed Something is pretty much a prerequisite for promotion in schools. Either that, or being the only full time permanent body left standing. And a lot of those changes may individually be desirable- adding something nice or closing off the pathway to something bad happening. But the overall effect is something like adding another bit of luggage to the donkey in Buckaroo, it's fine, it's fine and it stays that way until the donkey throws everything off.
As to the answer to the problem @Malmesbury describes so well... I'm sure that milages vary. But I suspect the issue is that remote micromanagement is a possibility now in a way that it wasn't before. Partly because of electronic documentation of process, but also because of the speed of electronic communication. It's probably still a bad idea, because an organisation, let alone a nation, shouldn't fit inside one brain, however enormous.
It's an attractive idea that everything can be run from one centre issuing commands. It appeals to fairness (no postcode lottery) and apparent efficiency (fewer politicians) and vanity (I can command everything). It's just that, even if the technology now exists (unlike 1970s Chile or 1960s Soviet Union), life isn't like that.
And for many, the crowning and punishing are the point of the exercise, even if the real information is what's happening around the average.
The devil will be in the details, but an obvious question that comes int my mind is why no-one further down the production line realised the flaw. Is it because they are so tuned to the process that they're not *meant* to notice issues? A human version of 'the computer says no'...
I made a few changes to PB in the last 24 hours to solve a few issues people were having:
(1) Stopped using external caching, because it was throwing errors. (I'll reimplement something closer to election night, but for now page load times are sufficiently low that it's fine.)
(2) Implemented proper forwarding for people who went to http rather than https
(3) Solved the bug where sometimes people would see the default Apache2 page rather than pb
If there are any other issues, please let me know. My email address is simply my username at gmail.com
You’ve forgotten to put up the donation link for the new server fund.
Kind regards
Sandpit.
There's a discussion here: https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962
I do have a related angle on this, though. How did we end up with so many rules and regulations?
Two answers are stupidity and malice. You have a loose set of rules and regulations, but someone does not do step 1 properly and causes a disaster - a fallen bridge, or a child being abused. Either because they made a mistake, or because they could not be bothered to do their job properly, perhaps because they gained from it.
There are many possible 'fixes' for this. Two are:
1) Better training and employees.
2) Add another later of process in, so the results of step 1 are checked.
Either. or both, of these can work. Or several others, depending on the application.
Let's look at something like railway signalling. A new signal can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to install. That sounds stupid. But if you look at the reasons for that cost, then you can see incidents in the past that have led to the rules and regulations that are now in place, and lead to the cost. And those incidents often cost lives. Do we want to save money and put more risk onto rail workers' (or passengers)?
I don't know what the answer is. In the case of the £250k bridge in Stiffkey, I'd guess it's because the NT don't want it and have elevated costs as much as possible. Or perhaps not.
Yes, that does appear to be the grandmother at the end.
Horrifying little vignette of English life. I wonder how the mother died.
So is Rishi Sunak.
No wonder the country is buggered.
So you'd have traders and every day at close of business each one would be presented with their "Daily P/L". This told them how much they had made or lost that day on their activities.
It typically took a whole bunch of qualified accountants (overpaid compared to everybody other than the traders) to produce this thing and they'd use a system linked to but separate from the main ledger. At month end the two systems never agreed so there'd be another team of professionals tasked with reconciling them. What a palaver.
And for what? Why did a trader have to know their profit or loss before they knocked off? They didn't. It was a nice to have at best. It's risk you need to monitor constantly not how much money you're making. So why did a whole operation-within-the-operation, with serious headcount and IT spend, exist to provide this info? Nobody could ever tell me.
We'll know more when the reports come out.
you lose the ability to crown winners and punish losers. (Even if both the winners and losers aren't statistically robust).
And for many, the crowning and punishing are the point of the exercise, even if the real information is what's happening around the average.
(I think it's a personal advantage to me that that part of my psyche remains massively underdeveloped, certainly compared with the average City trader. Society needs herbivores and carnivores, and being a carnivore just looks so damn stressful.)
For example, we know from back in the days when banks were run by clerks, that even simple human tasks have an error rate of about 1 in 500. To get a lower error rate than that, which is essential in many tasks, you need cross checking of some kind. But if people don't understand why this is, then 2 people checking turns into 0 people because they each thought the other had checked.
The best kind of cross checking is where the second check is where you have some kind of telltale which works on larger batches, eg 'I have checked that each pole is vertical, and now I can see they are all lined up'.
Often this kind of report gets written in the passive voice. Your teachers probably told you in school that scientific reports should be written in the passive voice. But did they tell you why? Probably not. The reason is, that science, which is intended to produce universal truths, is not supposed to depend on who is doing the process. In other areas it may be essential that the sheep was personally drowned by Damian Hirst, the cigar was rolled between virgin's thighs, or that the elixir was compounded by the only alchemist with sufficient skill. In science, this is not good practice. But most work is not science. If a process is supposed to enforce that things were done properly, eliding who did it just disclaims responsibility.
Where I partly disagree is that while there is often too much process at a lower level, there is often too little at the top. Leaders and high executives are allowed to get away with a narrative of success rather than having well defined responsibilities. The culture of vague aspirational claims is bad enough in consumer marketting, it's downright dangerous elsewhere.
(*) If my understanding of what happened is correct...
They were also trying to use delivery snagging as a substitute for QA. Instead of building planes right, just chuck them together. And believe that the pre delivery checks would find the problems.
So you had process interference multiplied by process abuse. Plus straight up incompetence.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpm6j8tIgsY/?igsh=OHNqcHpzdTNpYnJn
"Former senior civil servants, men and women trained in the art of diplomacy, recall with a shudder her foul-mouthed phone calls. “I don’t f**ing care about your f**ing process, I just want it done,” was typical of how Sturgeon conducted government business, according to one official I spoke to recently."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/nicola-sturgeon-s-behaviour-suggests-she-is-a-politician-who-never-grew-up-susan-dalgety/ar-BB1hHpAX
Potentially disagree with your second line. Minor problems will always occur, and I bet Airbus has people from (say) Broughton fixing minor snags on the main production lines in France. It's probably better than having people trying to fix problems Spirit created, for a variety of reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
(Certain Asian airlines have struggled with this, for well-documented cultural reasons).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_European_Airways_Flight_548
"An hour and a half before the departure of Flight 548, its rostered captain, Stanley Key, a former Royal Air Force pilot who had served during the Second World War, was involved in a quarrel in the crew room at Heathrow's Queens Building with a first officer named Flavell. The subject was the threatened strike, which Flavell supported and Key opposed. Both of Key's flight deck crew on Flight 548 witnessed the altercation, and another bystander described Key's outburst as "the most violent argument he had ever heard".[6] Shortly afterward Key apologised to Flavell, and the matter seemed closed."
Boeing is (and was) delivering broken planes and trying to fix them pre delivery. That’s process abuse. They shouldn’t be fixing that many issues that late in the game.
Spirit is a bullshit way of putting a chunk of Boeing at arms length. So the bean counters only need to count beans. It’s really a part of Boeing - just semi-disconnected.
Congratulations, you win the prize for what I expected.
Perfectly lined up with everything else that Sturgeon fucked up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWFtoqxj93U
I think Korean Airlines now require all cockpit conversations to be in English.
The skill is to use extreme politeness and sympathy as you reduce them to 10-12mm in height.
The world is full of process designers. There have to be some. There have to be rules and protocols and standards. And the world, on the whole, divides into doers and admin people, including process designers. So there are people who collectively build and maintain dwellings (eg Grenfell), and people who are part of ancillary processes.
Each group wishes to avoid blame; they are human.
The process designers can only avoid blame by covering all bases, even though they know their millions of pages will be mostly unread, ignored or not recalled.
The actual doers can't possibly cover all the bases, because it is impossible and impractical to know it all. So they hide behind blaming each other, apologising early and often, ceasing trading, and the force of inertia.
Non specialist managers, politicians and the media. They don’t understand what is being measured, but can compare result x to target y, and use it to suit their own purposes; which probably won’t be the purposes originally intended.
I think on measurement exercises generally (which does account for a lot of process) you ought to detach yourself and ask, does the benefit of knowing this thing justify the effort/cost of finding out? If that's not a clear yes, forget it.
And then there’s another issue (even with a yes) where the benefit is to one set of people but the effort comes from another. But let's not get onto capitalism. Replacing that is above my paygrade.
Its rather a case of management/executive capture with, if its of negative financial return, the shareholders (ie the capitalists) losing out.
It will also happen in non-capitalist sectors as well.
And Haaland and De Bruyne back.
Allardyce?
For our home-grown aspirant far-right leaders, such as Home Counties born privately-educated Farage or Home Counties born privately educated Tice, have their natural environment as the saloon bar of a Surrey pub, regailing their stockbroker friends with their ‘fnarr fnarr’ anecdotes on a Sunday afternoon….whilst their prospective electorate is out in places like Jaywick, trying to keep their fighting dogs away from the authorities. The appeal to the likes of Farage or Tice of spending their spare time knocking on mobile home doors in Jaywick and the like quickly pales.