The Judge RANTS!
Date: 15/11/06
The Curious Case Of The Inactive Banana, or "E Pericoloso
Sporgersi" (*)
If you haven't heard about this already, please spend a couple of
minutes reading this
story.
We've been in stitches over this for much of the day at the office.
You see our office is one of the ones mentioned in the story.
To be scrupulously fair (something I am decreasingly inclined to be
nowadays, because the same Depratment of Stoat is desperately trying to
centralise the remainder of my job, having
'outsourced' the rest of it earlier this year), what happened in
this particular case was that a local senior manager simply got
somewhat up himself and started embellishing procedure.
It's a shame that this has been allowed to grab the headlines. Not
because it brings HM Revenge and Cussdoms into public disrepute - that
in itself would be a superfluous act nowadays after The Affair Of The
Ballsed-up Tax Credit System - but because this is merely the most
ludicrous outcrop of that iceberg of melting insanity called LEAN.
A quick recap: LEAN is a way of systematising (sorry Steve!)
production first developed by Toyota to improve the way they make cars.
I could go for the cheap laugh and say that, given its origins, it
should be called REAN, but I'll resist the temptation. As this seemed
to work, in that it enhanced Toyota's reputation no end, it has been
taken up as a war banner by that army of fraudsters collectively known
as 'management consultants'. And so, LEAN has been applied to a wide
variety of processes, including (as in this instance) those for which
it was never intended: for how, in the name of The
Boss, could systems designed to produce better widgets faster and
cheaper possibly be adapted for such things as....well....dealing with
people's tax queries (just to give an example off the top of my head,
you understand)?
LEAN first came into the Depratment last year sometime, and its
bright-tailed and bushy-eyed acolytes have been spreading it with a
will (and when I say 'spreading', think agriculture). Oh, this was
going to make everything work! Backlogs of post would become things of
a bygone age!
To this end, a small but expensive army of private consultants was
parachuted behind enemy lines (e.g. our office), with the Secret Plans
which would lay waste to the inefficient ways of the past and lead us
into the sunny uplands of Freedom and Joy. You know, just like Bush
said would happen to Iraq?
And so our colleagues, many of whom had spent years doing the job
and meeting their targets, were treated to the regular sight of
apparently grown-up men and women playing with Stickle Bricks and
drawing perfect straight lines on whiteboards, and to the sound of
people previously regarded as sane (including some managers) using
words like 'diagnostics' and 'baselining' (this last is obviously a
melding together of the words 'basejumping' and 'mainlining', as being
injected with all this junk would make anyone want to find a tall
structure to leap off).
Staff were moved around, sometimes by the day. They were reduced to
doing only one part of a job one day, and a different part the next.
The 1990s fetish of 'whole case working' was abandoned for the tactics
of the assembly line. People are being treated not just as if they were
nine-year-olds, but as if they were retarded nine-year-olds.
And this by people who have never done the job themselves.
The result? Ever increasing backlogs of work. Greater panic among
senior managers as this state of affairs becomes impossible to hide.
And the morale of hard-working staff exhibiting all the characteristics
of The China Syndrome (i.e., it feels like you're in a very bad movie).
All this would be bad enough. But the Depratment, for all its
claims to the contrary, isn't even operating LEAN properly. Indeed, one
of the country's leading authorities on LEAN, John Seddon, has stated
clearly that what HMRC is doing is the very antithesis of what LEAN
is all about.
But still it goes on. And will go on, because no-one in
senior management has the balls to admit to what is bloodily obvious.
They, no doubt, will still get their reward, either in this life or the
next (or 'the private sector', as it's so quaintly known).
In the meantime, more and more of the tax money of Mr., Mrs. and
Ms. UK Taypayer will be spent on trying to prop up this failure. People
who are there to do their jobs will spend increasing amounts of their
time filling in statistical records rather than do what they're
supposed to be there to do. And the people who are, for want of a
better word, 'responsible' for the mess will still claim that
it has been a great success, and would have been moreso but for the
obstructiveness of staff who were, misguidedly, trying to provide a
service to the public who pay their salaries instead of using their
time wisely to stroke the egos of private-sector meddlers and their
all-too-eager little helpers who have swallowed, and who use, the fetid
vocabulary of MBA-speak (MBA = Mostly Bollocks, Actually) with such
evident relish.
Now you know, as Spike Milligan used to say, what's wrong with the
bloody country...
(* Italian: "It is dangerous to LEAN out")
