We're at Step 1 of our StageGate Process.
Nov. 27th, 2006 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fancycwabsTomorrow, our Danish overlords are coming to town for a pre-meeting to Get Their Shit Together prior to the China trip next week, and I'm invited! Three hundred manhours devoted to reading the contract. The most edumacated member of our team has a Mechanical Engineering degree and an MBA from MIT, from what I understand, and is the party responsible for this travesty.
Look--I'm a pretty well-educated guy, myself. I recall a couple of companies ago when management started passing around copies of Re-Engineering the Corporation and people who had no idea who Thomas Kuhn was were talking about a "paradigm shift" as a synonym for layoffs. I understand the core principals of TQM and Six Sigma voodoo whatsis, but I also understand that these things are not a good fit with our business model, as we don't make widgets. My division's profit has always stemmed from Customer Focused Custom Design Work, and attempts to shoehorn that into economies of scale are destined to fail, and we spend $3,000 composing emails and making phone calls debating who's gonna pay for a $50 box of spare bolts.
Anyway, in the spirit of modern management, we have a ten-person, four-day meeting scheduled for the rest of this week, and I'm THRILLED about losing four days of productive work out of the eleven we have left to get ready for our first design review, which is apparently going to be moved up by two weeks to save some airfare. In the meantime, we still have more fucking managers on the job than we have engineers capable of doing actual work, and what engineers we do have seem to be dropping like flies.
Look--I'm a pretty well-educated guy, myself. I recall a couple of companies ago when management started passing around copies of Re-Engineering the Corporation and people who had no idea who Thomas Kuhn was were talking about a "paradigm shift" as a synonym for layoffs. I understand the core principals of TQM and Six Sigma voodoo whatsis, but I also understand that these things are not a good fit with our business model, as we don't make widgets. My division's profit has always stemmed from Customer Focused Custom Design Work, and attempts to shoehorn that into economies of scale are destined to fail, and we spend $3,000 composing emails and making phone calls debating who's gonna pay for a $50 box of spare bolts.
Anyway, in the spirit of modern management, we have a ten-person, four-day meeting scheduled for the rest of this week, and I'm THRILLED about losing four days of productive work out of the eleven we have left to get ready for our first design review, which is apparently going to be moved up by two weeks to save some airfare. In the meantime, we still have more fucking managers on the job than we have engineers capable of doing actual work, and what engineers we do have seem to be dropping like flies.
