Posted on 10/04/2004 3:51:42 PM PDT by Willie Green
Years ago, when a civilian worker at one of the nation's largest Air Force bases was working for a general, she watched as a team was formed to come up with a better system to handle mail.
Mail to the base included letters from multi-starred generals and directives that had deadlines. The "process improvement team," also known as a PIT, had a roster of middle managers, mostly civilians, who spent the better part of a month coming up with a plan.
But instead of streamlining the process, they complicated it. "I was horrified," the woman says. "There used to be eight steps; now there were 19." Each piece of official mail was viewed by a greater number of managers before getting to its intended recipient, she says, enabling the mail to be lost at home or in the bathroom, or covered with spills from someone's breakfast. And ponies could have delivered it faster. The lag between the first manager who saw a piece of mail and the person who had to act on it was two weeks, she says.
Questioning the team would have amounted to heresy, so she kept quiet until a year later, when her general emerged from his office and bellowed, "What the hell is happening to my mail?" Once enlightened, he changed everything on the spot.
(Excerpt) Read more at ctnow.com ...
Just in time for the holiday mailing season...........aaarrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
"None of us is as stupid as all of us"
only a government group could screw up an IMI team...
Congressman Billybob
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I remember reading a story awhile ago about a company whose internal mail handling was so bad people would use FedEx for important inter-departmental communications (within the same building!)
Sir,
About 80% of the time just entering, for user id and password, slashdot and slashdot, will get you in while maintaining privacy. Just worked for me on this one.
Because they couldn't walk over to the person???????
As you have been in the business world, the rest of the article would hold no surprise for you. It merely iterates what all of us already knew: A committee (or, in this case, a "team") is capable of making decisions that no one member, acting alone, would conceivably support, much less initiate.
Committees are for wasting time, en masse.
I admit it seemed a bit strange, though in some large buildings security regs or other rules might make "just waking over to the person" somewhat difficult.
I live in a small semi rural town and kind of forget there's a BIG world out there.
I don't know. All of the A-Team's ideas worked very well and involved a homemade tank. What's not to like?
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