Published by JPLand on 04 Feb 2009 at 10:28 pm
Rethinking
It seems that everywhere I turn, people are being hampered from their work by bureaucracy…red tape, paperwork, management, reports, etc. I remember when I first started working at my current job. I was constantly looking for solutions to technical problems. I drew, designed, analyzed. It was the work that I had trained for in college. Contrast that with the past three days. On paper, I’ve officially checked two drawings. 30 minutes of work…tops. What I’ve really been doing is filling out spreadsheets, updating schedules, identifying training, mapping processes, and all kinds of other stuff that doesn’t seem to help out at all. It’s all part of the territory of managing projects, I suppose.
Over the past three years, I have been involved with the implementation of CMMI at my office. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you can read the long, boring wiki article that is linked. Once you get to the point in the article that you don’t understand what it says, come back here and we’ll be on the same page. The short explanation is that it’s a very document-heavy way of doing things. Make a decision, document it. Have a meeting to discuss the decision. Document the meeting…..and on and on and on. (You should clearly document and label all of those “on and ons”, as well) I used to think that being a program manager was challenging because of the work required. Now it’s just impossible because of the documentation that’s required. And I’m not even doing it right!
I’m working on my Masters in Engineering and Technical Management. (Think of it as an MBA for engineers.) My original thinking was that this would be helpful in for my program management roles and eventually, if I ever move into management. Now, I’m rethinking all of that. I’m wondering if I can take courses that let me go back to when I was dumb and happy. I’m also wondering if managers get paid so much not because of what they know, but because the money is the only reason that anyone would do their job.
Steve Levinson on 06 Feb 2009 at 12:21 pm #
I hear you! A healthcare professional and program administrator for 35 years, I left the field last spring because I got sick and tired of all the bullshit in healthcare that interferes with healthcare! For the past several years, I watched in disgust as documentation increasingly became more important than service itself. Although I’m hardly an anarchist, my sense is that exposure to so many requirements unrelated to mission cause good mission-focused people in any field to suffer first from “rule fatigue,” which turns into something far worse - “mission fatigue!” What’s more, the growing emphasis on bullshit rather than substance means that leadership positions will be filled increasingly with people who either favor bullshit or can’t tell the difference between bullshit and mission, and consequently entire industries will produce less and less of real value. It’s like a charitable organization that spends more and more of the money it raises to support itself and therefore has less and less money available to devote to the cause the organization was founded to address. I feel so strongly about this that I’m actually working on a book about the subject. It’s called “Mission Made Impossible.”