Coporate Red-tape and the Art of Incompetence.

Wow. I didn't realize that it had been over 6 months since I have written in this thing. I have been busy with a new process at my place of employment for the past year that has kept me preoccupied. This process is to control the way that my department documents the projects that we work on. I, along with a co-worker, wrote this process to make sure that my department is compliant with all of corporate's bureaucracy as well as all of the government agencies that we deal with. Ok, fair enough. However, when writing this document and going through all of the scenarios that I could foresee, I was pretty confident that this process would be more cumbersome than what we were currently doing, but still do-able based on our business model.

Well, I should have, but didn't, consider the human factor. I am amazed sometimes at the people that are hired to do the jobs that they are hired to do. It makes me wonder sometimes if some people are hired just t0 fill a cubicle, or office, that would otherwise be empty. Here is what I mean...

The purpose of our document is to be able to defend the design of a part in a corporate or governmental audit. I believe that in the business that I am in some extra precautions are needed, and that designs should have the proper considerations and justifications for function and safety. I can defend that with any good design. What I can't defend are the questions that I get from internal "team" members. Here are a few situations where I have been made speechless.

1. When showing what effect a that adding a feature to an existing part, I made a calculation using a the formula for a moment of intertia on the cross-section of a cylinder. This formula can be found in any physics text book, in any industry reference manuals, and on the internet (if you search for "list of all formulas that anyone can use". Lilo (the person that I am referring to in this posting) disagreed with the accuracy of the formula. NOT the calculations, NOT the reason I chose it, BUT the formula itself. When I started explaining it, it was like explaining The Theory of Relativity to Forrest Gump.
2. When explaining the changes made to a part, Lilo asked, "you mean these aren't exactly like the ones we currently sell?" Since our department is a specials department where our whole business model is that we take standard parts and modify them to customers' requests, and she has been "supporting" our department for 3-4 year, you would think that she might have bought a clue along the way.
3. I have been asked to change the wording that describes how reference documents are placed in our design history files (e.g. "Don't put, 'reference attached documents'. Put, 'see attached documents.') This sounds minor, but things like this will keep Lilo from signing the right forms so that we can actually sell the parts.
4. On one occasion, she was making a point on how something HAD to be done, I was reiterrating the point, and she argued with me that "it couldn't be done that way". After I explained that I was agreeing with her, she still said that it couldn't be done that way.

There are many more, but I am getting tired of listing them. Maybe I will save them for a future blog entry.

Till next time, whenever that is, peace.