this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Work Reform
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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I am fresh off a rather interesting conversation with my boomer boss. I’m a new manager and I’m working on policy and process. I was basically shut down, told to not bother documenting, that we have a way of doing things and he would spend every day with me for weeks to get it right if he had to.
I asked again, wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to have these processes documented and accepted rather than force muscle memory? I even offered to document the process during our training sessions but was told that were a small company and no one will look at documentation if we create it (we’re a 2000 employee manufacturing company).
Oh well, I know how to work around obstinance and he’s pretty old.
That's crazy. Anyone who is against documentation should not have a job that requires literacy.
Think there's a balance.
I work at a company where they have a documented process for everything. The thing is once some thing is in a document, it's like some written in stone mandate that becomes unchangeable and inflexible. The stuff in the "oral tradition" remains flexible.
Every so often new blood comes along, sees how dysfunctional the documented processes are, and proposes to fix the processes. Now in principle, they are right, but those of us who have been through a few iterations dread the outcome. Invariably the changes they propose to replace stupid existing processes are instead just added to existing processes, because some folks recognize the improvement but no one wants the blame for a mistake caused by leaving the old process behind. So each time we end up with more redundant stupid work.
So while in principle, documented processes are right, sometimes the political reality is stupid.
The. Your company is doing lean six sigma wrong....if at all. Processes are supposed to improve and change all the time.
What's a sigma?
Both of you are right.
You meed to document processes. The minute you put them to paper they will be out of date. No one will read them. It has always been so.
But it does allow you to go, "Ah here's where the process went wrong, step 6 in the SOP. Why don't you use it as a guide for the next one?" It then isn't me vs them, it's me helping them understand the documented process collaboratively.
Yup. Documentation is a necessary, but imperfect medium.
I just started at a new company that really invests time in documenting their processes, but the are poorly made by people that don't understand the process itself and, in some cases, the process itself is poorly planned and has to be changed over and over again, to the point where the DTP looks nothing like what's actually done...
I was instructed to review the documentation you twin myself, but advised the process did not actually describe the process itself....
That’s precisely what I’m after, and what I’m proposing. I don’t care about the outputs, I care about the process that gets them to us.
Also why they need to be living documents, but if we have to reinvent the wheel every time we need a new one, it slows things down. I should mention, I’m on the IT side.
There are Process people and there are Get It Done people. Both are necessary. In their extremes, both are bad. When they work together they can do great things.
Depending on industry certs, documenting things will make life easier.