Severe Anxiety Protocol

Dear J-

We’re going to have a meeting with our corporate office to discuss the issues going on with the current software rollout (if they had a motto, it would naturally be something like “unprepared and untrained”) at our specific site.  Given our current woeful state where we’ve been sharing our mistakes and lessons on a daily basis (and having them switch places — amending lessons and vowing not to repeat them too often the next day) I imagine they’ll have enough of an earful from other folks, but I’d like to chip in as well.

The world of working under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is different than any other; even the simple act of buying spare parts requires careful documentation — imagine, if you will, going to buy spark plugs for your car and, since they don’t stock the original equipment Bosch platinum plugs, you have to pick out the critical characteristics (fit, resistance, configuration, etc.) and document the equivalence to what they’ve got, and furthermore, document the paper trail all the way back to the manufacturer of the raw materials.  We had a lot of specalized tools to facilitate our jobs, tools that have now been taken away and replaced with something more generic, but with extra features tacked on.  They took our Ferrari and gave us a Fiero with a bodykit and are telling us it’s the same — oh, we’ll get there, but not quickly.  You know it’s an upside-down world when I, with less than two years experience, am giving advice to folks who’ve been doing the same job for twenty-plus.

All along, we trusted them to take care of our needs — we were reassured at every turn that they had experts in our work processes making the generic software fit what we did.  After they rolled it out — this, after a scant six weeks of training — we realized what a bill of goods that idea was, and we’re spending more time piecemealing together what we used to do in this brave new world.  I don’t mind being busy, and I don’t mind learning a new system, but I’m still aghast at how clumsily we rolled it out.  As our rollout approached, it was increasingly clear (the second rule of managerial expertise dictates that the more produced and glossier the flyers become, the less information they contain) that there was a desperate need to save face and keep the rollout date in the face of certain uncertainty.

Mike

Tags: clumsy, erp, nrc, rollout, saving face, software, system, training, work