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by cm2187 2824 days ago
What’s funny is that it is the attitude most people adopt in these organisations but not those who are the most successful at climbing the ladder, which you can’t really do without some boldness, bending or challenging the rules, etc, that’s how you get things done and getting things done is a quality that managenent likes.

But what is perverse is that the whole organisation is designed to prevent that. Distributing responsabilities among many people, none of who understand the whole process, all of who are just trying to apply some policies with no understanding of what these policies are meant for, and be ready to kill the company if the policy says so.

I work in one of these kafkaesque places on the business side, I remember a project manager from IT once telling me that they need to make a change mandated by the compliance department that makes absolutely no sense and would have prevented us from serving our clients. I challenge IT, no we don’t want to go to jail, it has to be done. I go to the compliance department, explain why it is a moronic decision (with a bit more tact), they agree, and reverse the policy.

And I have seen that done many many times. So many people in these orgs are paid to say no, to resist any change, or simply do not care or understand. One needs to plow through, which requires a huge amount of energy, and results in most project being half baked, over expensive or simply never getting anywhere.

That’s why large organisations, populated by otherwise smart, well educated people generate so much mediocrity.

1 comments

I'm not sure what you're saying went wrong in that process. You were the one who wanted a compliance mandate reversed, so who should have talked to the compliance department about it if not you?
Rather that IT would have implemented a change even if they thought it didn't make any sense just out of fear of falling foul of some internal policy. What I say is that large organisation are pleagued by people doing things that are counterproductive either because they don't care, don't understand, or live under the fear of breaching some internal policy, instead of doing the right thing, challenging these policies when it makes sense.
You're not wrong, but I think you're looking at it backwards. Policies are just codified decisions - and large organizations make a lot of decisions. If everyone second-guessed every decision they didn't personally understand, there'd be no time left to get work done.
There should have been push-back on the change before it got to the implementation stage. It shouldn't be down to the implementor to query the decision (as they won't have full sight of all factors). That querying should have happened at the management level.

When a nonsensical requirement reaches implementation, it indicates that all the gatekeeping in place before this stage has failed.