Wasting Time With Vague Solutions, Part 1

Helping management deal with common cause

Fri, 09/14/2012 - 12:05

Let’s revisit two scenarios from my July 2012 column, “The Sobering Reality of ’Beginner’s Mind.’” First, a medical center’s Harvard MBA COO insisted on nothing less than 100-percent computer uptime, no excuses. His IT department’s inability to get 100-percent uptime consistently has resulted in yet another monthly “account for results” meeting.

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The agenda: Get the result for the past month; show some type of table or bar graph summary (typically a red/yellow/green assessment accompanied by a variation on “this month, last month, 12 months ago”); listen to the predictable litany of excuses for why it didn’t happen the past month; and come up with the (latest) plan on how to fix it... until the next unexpected thing happens.

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Comments

Although not a perfect solution, in the downtime example I have to wonder if sufficient reliability techniques of redundancy wouldn't save some face to demonstrate progress while new processes can be designed.  You'll suffer from COO disatisfaction of getting closer to, but not achieving 100 percent availability. But maybe get some credit for improvement. I guess I ust want to point out fault removal isn't the only way to improve -fault tolerance has a place in the toolkit.

Although not a perfect solution, in the downtime example I have to wonder if sufficient reliability techniques of redundancy wouldn't save some face to demonstrate progress while new processes can be designed.  You'll suffer from COO disatisfaction of getting closer to, but not achieving 100 percent availability. But maybe get some credit for improvement. I guess I ust want to point out fault removal isn't the only way to improve -fault tolerance has a place in the toolkit.

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