Category Archives: Career

The Dilbert® Life Series – White Collar Blues in Corporate Culture

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It’s unbelievable how awfully bad a lot of methodologies, regulations, evaluations, and planning and audit systems are implemented and used. While this might seem to be just your average, run of the mill Kafka red tape, the outcome is often disastrous to the workplace. This is quite the opposite of what they are supposed to achieve: effective and efficient high quality results that are delivered as fast as possible without sacrificing any the above mentioned qualities. An added benefit would be a stimulating and happy work environment leading to motivated personnel thus achieving the ultimate productive workplace Walhalla. More than people and organizations like to admit unfortunately, this theory flies in the face of reality. Organizations become cesspools of demotivation, incompetence and careerism at its worst. Often the real (Machiavellian) objective seems to enslave employees by coercion, fear, passiveness and immobility in order to turn them into little mignons. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what writing vast amounts of mind numbing documents and reports achieves. In other words meet “Office Space”.

Bureaucratic red tape is one thing. Adding over the top, ill understood and badly implemented regulations & frameworks will sink any organization faster than a well-placed torpedo sinks a ship. Any hope of ever improving the results, motivate people and stimulate innovation are either killed instantly or drowned slowly. You end up with a worthless bureaucratic malfunctioning organization run by mediocre management, hiring mediocre people producing, at best, mediocre results. Your organizations agility, decisiveness, innovation and creativity are dead. You might as well have sent hit men to get it over and done with.  Are you even at least still thinking about your customers or clients needs somewhere in that situation?

Very often no one ever reads the documentation and reports that audits, evaluations and regulatory mechanisms demand. If they are being read, sometimes they are used to help an organization improve itself. But they are also read and misused to badmouth, reprimand, control and even coerce organizations and people into submission to further other less noble agendas. Look at the mess the global finance world is in. No one can deny we have more legislation, regulation, control mechanisms and audits than ever before and how are they used and what is the result? And it’s nobody’s fault or mistake; they all have tons of paperwork to document anything and everything you want.

Now let’s be crystal clear about this. There is a real need for regulation, evaluation, audits, policies and methodologies. And yes, that comes with its share of bureaucracy. But it has to be done right and with honesty in its purpose. Unfortunately the excessive nature of the perverse sublimations of these mechanisms on the work floor are enough to make one think tar and feathers or even guillotines did and do serve a genuine purpose. This is especially true if your job turns out to be a one where the only thing that can keep you from going insane is the fact that you’re a lunatic. Furthermore have any of those people ever caught on to the idea that creativity, flexibility and innovation needs a little chaos? Do they really think that you can put flexibility and creativity in a process that can be orderly reported on and audited? Sure they have, but the consultancies selling processes and services can’t bottle creativity, flexibility and real innovation. They deal in shrink wrapped products, so you’ll never hear them advice against their own bottom line. It’s hard enough to get any real work done in an office today as it is. Ah, the joys of landscape noise yards, and endless series of meetings, interruptions by way to many people busy filling out forms who needing input. Add to that architects and advisors who seem to suffer “idea diarrhea” and whose “easy and fast” implementations only fail because those operational employees just “don’t get it”. Middle management does all this in a vanity attempt to demonstrate their worth and avoid true responsibility. Sadly they only achieve quite the opposite and if management let’s ‘m get away with this, you now also have a good idea about the quality of your managers.

So what do all these mechanism truly achieve? Based on my observation of too many colleagues and acquaintances in their work environments I’ll report my findings. Well for one, as stated above, they are great tools for assimilation, compliance and submission to the power players. Everyone knows that many audits quickly become a mere bundle of check lists you need to have. You learn that evaluations are meaningless obligations and planning documents often seem to be more of an “after action report” than actual planning. This is truly perfect in a way. After all compliance is bliss and it’s far easier to achieve this with neatly organized forms and retroactive or revisionist “planning”. Trust me; your paperwork will look great.

Why do we go along with this crap? Because it’s easy, that’s why. That feeling of comfort we get by falling into simple routines seduces us. The path of least resistance is to become an expert paper pusher and methodology whore. No one will criticize you for making the best reports ever, with a keen eye for form and adherence to protocol. In return you get to enjoy the benefits of a predigested workload and you won’t have to work too hard. It’s so much easier to close your eyes. To me this is like freezing to death, you give up and go to sleep to be greeted by a false sense of warmth.

I also see people get demotivated and become cynical survivalists, which is the best outcome for them. Worse is the systemized destruction of productivity and ability to compete but I guess that’s far less important than it seems. That “free market” and result driven meritocracy probably isn’t as free and valuable as we are led to believe. The loss of productivity is plain to see by the way. If you have a 40 hour work week and now they add constant reporting, auditing, adherence to methodologies and policies to your workload, how much work are you actually doing? The reports and numbers become your prime concern. Sure they say that’s not how it’s supposed to be, but unfortunately it often turns out this way. Even more “cynical” is the fact that the most incompetent, underperforming, self-serving employees and managers thrive in these systems. Now this is a reality in any system but the farce here is that all this bureaucratic crap was supposed to reduce that likelihood. In that aspect it’s one big fail. Badly used audits, reports, evaluations and planning documents are not a very good indicator whether people are doing a good job. What they are excellent for is finding out who’s able to market themselves, either individually or as an organization, as impressive examples of professional excellence. They empower career hunting conformists and thus cultivate mediocrity. Some of the best people out there suck at the paperwork. Why? Well when you’re working 40 hours a week you don’t have the time to do it. If you still have to do it becomes overtime. And that’s the extra time you used to have to study and learn, to become a better professional. In other words your best people are forced to work harder and put in more time, which means that take a huge pay cut. To add injury to insult those systems “meant to help them” are psychologically harassing them. You drain your personnel’s motivation and energy away by simply abusing them. The ones who fill out the forms perfectly are the ones working 20 hours a week and then spending the rest of their time presenting those 20 hours as sublime feats of their expertise and creative endeavor. They have long recognized that when you put things on paper they come in existence without effort; far more so than if you really create them doing actual work. This is the so called “fake it until you make it” method. The system promotes underperforming, risk-free, easy work without responsibility and it attracts the kind of employees who seek to be submissive little mignons in return for a pay check and peace of mind and perhaps even a promotion. Is that what it takes to build a “state of the art” organization? Are you even at least still thinking about your customers needs?

People try to survive by threating that crap as a necessary evil. But make no mistake, in the end they will give up and will leave. The leave physically or mentally, i.e. they become under performers or cynical zombies soaking in apathy as their last line of defense. As I told my boss once: “You shouldn’t be afraid that your employees might leave. You need to be afraid when you fear your employees will stay”.

Unless you have a real low IQ or you’re blissfully ignorant, when you live the lie, you become the lie. A lot of people in the workplace are in a world of hurt. They survive thanks to their conformity and submission. Look people, you’re married, divorced, perhaps remarried and your live is complicated. You’re in debt. You have car payments, house payments, alimony payments, gas & electricity bills, insurance payments, kids to support, etc. And you really need to take a holiday to get ways from all that shit in a desperate effort to maintain your sanity. In other words you’re up shit creek. The day you start living the truth in your job you’ll become and undesired nuisance and, inevitably, an unemployed middle aged “nonproductive member of society”. Because when you’re job hunting with no real skills except for filling out paperwork and submitting to the lie what are you good for? Look, they can train 24 year olds to do that, for far less money. Sure you have a very impressive resume as an expert advisor, a senior architect, but you know what, they’re on to you. You see, they all have very impressive resumes and they all worked at the same places where people are hiding in the mass whilst pretending to be awesome and hoping desperately nothing will expose them as frauds. It’s a shared lie. Put ‘m among the real experts and see how well they can keep a rich and stimulating professional conversation going.

My advice? Start thinking! If you don’t, you’ll end up not even being allowed and capable to think and speak as you see fit. Whose fault is this? Yours. You submit and in return you get a job, an income and the illusion of security. And you are so desperately in need of that. Because you are a slave to debt and conformity, a victim of your own fears. So stop being afraid and get a grip unless you want to wind up like some humanoid battery in “The Matrix”. Be warned however, they’ll hire some consultant called Mr. Smith to get you “back on track”, but he actually thinks that you are a disease and he’s the cure.

The Dilbert® Life Series: Enterprise Architecture Revisited One Year Later

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The Dilbert® Life series is a string of post on corporate culture from hell and dysfunctional organizations running wild. This can be quite shocking and sobering. The amount of damage that can be done by "merely" taking solid technology, methodologies, people and organizations, which you then abuse the hell out of, is amazing. A sense of humor will help when reading this. If you need to live in a sugar coated world were all is well and bliss and think all you do is close to godliness, stop reading right now and forget about the blog entries. It’s going to be dark. Pitch black at times actually, with a twist of humor, if you can laugh at yourself that is. And no, there is no light to shine on things, not even when you lite it. You see, pointing a beam in to the vast empty darkness of human nature doesn’t make you see anything. You do realize there is an endless, vast and cold emptiness out there. This is not unlike the cerebral content of way to many people I come across by in this crazy twilight zone called “the workplace”. I believe some US colleagues refer to those bio carbon life forms as “sheeple”.

Last year my very first blog post (https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/01/16/hello-world/) was about the one and only meeting I ever had with the Enterprise Architecture consultants that came in to help out at place where I do some IT Infrastructure Fu. Now one year, lots of time, money, training and Power Point slide decks after that meeting, the results on the terrain are nowhere to be seen. Sure there were lots of meetings, almost none of which I attended unless they dragged enterprise architecture into an IT related meeting on some other also vague action items like the IT strategy that was never heard of again. They’ve also created some new jobs specifications and lots of lip service and they’ll probably hire some more consultants to help out in 2011. But for now the interaction with and impact of any Enterprise Architecture on their IT infrastructure is nowhere to be found.

We put a good infrastructure plan in place for them. It’s pretty solid for 2011, pretty decent for 2012 and more like a road map for the time span 2013-2014. Meaning it’s flexible as in IT the world can change fast, very fast. But none of all this has come to be due to insights, needs, demands or guidance of any enterprise architecture, IT strategy or business plan.  No, it’s past experience and gut feeling, knowing the culture of the organization etc.  Creating strategies, building architectures is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. Combine this with fact that there is a bunch of higher pay grade roles up for grabs and the politics become very dominant. Higher pay grades baby? What do I need to get one? Skills and expertise in a very critical business area of cause!  Marketing yourself as a trusted business advisor, taught leader and architect becomes extremely important. As you can imagine getting the job done becomes a lot more difficult and not because of technical reasons. My predictions for 2011 are that by the end the year those pay grades will have been assigned. Together with a boatload of freshly minted middle management, who’ll be proud as hell and will need to assert their new found status, they’ll start handing out work to their staff.  Will that extra work materialize into results or only hold them back from making real progress? Well, we’ll need to wait for 2012 to know as 2011 will be about politics.

Basically from the IT infrastructure point of view and experience we have not yet seen an Enterprise Architecture and I don’t think they’ll have one in the next 12 months. Perhaps in 24 to 36 months but by then the game plan in IT infrastructure will be up and running. So realistically, I expect, if it leads anywhere against expectations, the impact of an Enterprise Architecture will be for 2014 and beyond. Which means an entirely new ball game and that will need a revised architecture. The success of the effort will no doubt be that they detected the need to change. This sounds uncomfortable similar to the IT strategy plan they had made. So for now we’ll do for them what’ we’ve always done. We’ll work with one year plans, two to three year roadmaps combined with a vision on how to improve the IT infrastructure. The most important thing is to stay clear of ambition and politics. Too much of that makes for bad technical decisions.

You got to love corporate bull. They don’t lie, no sir, they just sell bull crap. Which is worse, truth or lies don’t even matter, just the personal agendas. Liars at least, by the very fact of lying, acknowledge the value of truth, so much in fact, they’d rather have you not knowing it. Most consultancy firms send out kids that are naïve enough to believe the scripts and don’t even realize they are talking crap. They are told over and over again they are right, the best and they like to believe this so much they really do. It’s a bit like civil servants at the EU. Pay people double their market value, sweet talk their ego’s all day long and they will become prophets for the religion of the day. No, I’m not saying Enterprise Architecture is bull crap. I’m saying that way too many people & companies claiming to do enterprise architecture are turning it into exactly that. IT strategies, architectures that are so empty and void of content that all those binders are thrown in a drawer never to be seen again. A fool with a tool is still but a fool. Agile methodologies or tools don’t make your programmers agile gurus just like owning a race car doesn’t make you a race car pilot. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Every new, innovative process, methodology or concept falls victim to this. The money grabbing sales crowd gets there paws on it and starts selling it as competitive advantage or even innovation in a bottle to the corporate sheeple & management failures that should know better. They end with less money, loads of wasted time and a shitload of dead trees. As a side node, this whole “* Architect” thing  has runs it’s inflationary course. We need a new professional status currency once more. Take care and keep laughing clip_image001!

Heavy Snowfall, Telecommuting & Office Situations Gone Wrong

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Well, it’s winter again and we’ve had plenty of heavy snowfall disrupting traffic and the daily commute. Pictures of commuters pushing the busses they normally ride made the news head lines. No worries for me. I just work from home those days. That’s a good thing for a lot of reasons. You spend less time commuting in peak traffic, get more work done than at the office, you pollute less and you’re used to working remotely. That means you’ll be able to do it without any issues when there is a need like a flooded office floor, a flu pandemic or harsh weather conditions. Even better is that you can do this cheap and secure using the licenses you already have for Windows 2008 R2/Windows 7 with solutions like Remote Desktop Gateway  and Direct Access. Sounds pretty good right? So why aren’t more organizations using this to the fullest?

It is amazing how few companies really use telecommuting and remote access to their benefit. The culture shift it requires is usually to big of a hurdle. Yeah right. You often do see it happen on a larger scale when the company can close an office building due to telecommuting. That’s cold hard cash savings right there. Think of it. When there are huge monetary savings involved they’ll outsource work to the other end of the world and all objections disappear or “need to be dealt with”. So why is this? The lack of using telecommuting to the fullest of its potential is, to me, an indication of management failure. It’s so much easier to fool yourself into thinking your employees are productive when you can physically see them and they punch in and out. Whatever happened to that result driven organization? I know some employees need an office, not to have a place to work, but because of all the fun things you can do there. Gossip, small talk, lunches, meetings, etc. Some have bad home situations are are happier at the office or they bought an overly expensive house and the added heating cost would bankrupt them so they prefer to come in even with a 3 hour commute. Those people tend to confirm bosses in their beliefs that people need an office. Crappy managers also need control and rules. It’s a good indication on how your employers see you. Do they see you like irresponsible children who need to be protected against themselves, guarded and ruled by policies? Or do they think of you as responsible adults who’ll get the job done?

Now there is the  careerists view that you need to go to the office as well. You need to be seen working. The more people you can involve the more important your work looks and the longer it takes. Bad managers & bad companies like that for some weird reason. You see nothing is as annoying to a boss than employees who are to good and fast at their jobs. They tend to disturb the balance or come nag for input and direction which leads to having to manage. Ok, some managers like that as it serves their ego’s and confirms they are needed by their “sheeple”. Well in all honesty, when some of your employees get the job done in 20 hours per week that’s not their problem. It’s yours. You have way to many employees that are not up to the job at hand or you have a lot of fakers, who just fill time until they can punch out. And bad managers will never fail to “punish” the most productive employee by assigning them more work. Basically training them to do less and less because they figure out pretty quick productivity and speed doesn’t’ get them anything but more work for the same pay. That meritocracy that everyone seems to want, isn’t that result driven? But to recognize results you need to have a clue. But that’s another problem and I won’t go into that any further here. What do you think your boss like better. All projects completed and money made but you telecommuting 50% or a perfect office attendance record but project over time and over budget? Right.

To add insult to injury the office nowadays are landscape ones. Fields of blatting sheep, people interrupting each other all the time for input, telephone calls, vast amounts of senseless meetings with way to many participants and way to few decisions. They want to drag you in to every meeting as they think you have to execute all there ideas. No, you don’t. You already have a job and if the only thing they can produce is work for others to do there is something wrong. Employees should reduce the workload of the organization not increase it. Than two, three four colleagues who come over for a chat, eating another our of of your day. At one job it’s gotten that bad that when I had to spend a day at the office I tried to get home as soon as possible so I could start doing some work. Which I hated as bad office situations drain my energy. Some people are happy with activity and call it a day. But I’m very sorry, that doesn’t cut it. I need progress and results. A good taught provoking talk on this can be found here http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/05/fried.office.work/index.html, it’s by Jason Fried of http://37signals.com/.

I’ll give you some examples of my own. I recently agreed to go in to the office for one day during a holiday because of an urgent meeting. That meeting wasn’t urgent at all and everything could have waited another month that’s one but hey they taught it was cool and the boss was real happy. But the real silly thing is I sat down at my office to print the agenda for the meeting and within 15 minutes three people came by claiming my urgent assistance, attendance or time. One was indeed urgent but should have gone to the service desk. The other two where prime examples of a meeting culture run amok (yes with all those meetings people are rustling up attendees) and egoistic failure to plan. Really people, your failure to plan does not make it my emergency. Those are typically the people who run out early and can not ever stay late. Or need stuff urgently and when they get it go on leave for 3 to 4 weeks. As true spoiled children they act annoyed, let down and helpless when they are told I’m not there for them. “What to do now?"!”. Well the best answer is “grow up, get a grip and learn to plan ahead”.  That does not mean go moan to the boss, trust me on this one. If you’re entire existence is dependent on people being on stand by for every need that arises or them attending every meeting you hold you must be the commander of SAC/NORAD or something. Either that or you’re doing something very wrong.

Now offices can be useful if and when they are functional. A lot of office environments are far from that. They are toxic time wasters and that is such a shame. Offices can be smaller, more efficient and productive than they are now.  Augment that with flexible working and telecommuting and all the noise around commuter hell, missed deadlines, meetings, productivity and profit can go to garbage bin where they belong. Today, so many jobs do not need to be affected too much by weather, small disasters, pandemics but you will have to learn to work smarter and better. As a bonus you’ll have less tress, a cleaner environment and less traffic jams. What is not to like? So use the winter weather and all its problems with transport to rethink the way you work. You’ll be better of on the whole.