craigmcn

It’s too early for me to hate my workplace. I’ve been in a new job, on a 1-year contract, for 24 days now and I’m fed up with the bullshit. We have this “continuous improvement” program that’s all the rage around here, but it basically means that the people in charge of finding solutions to problems don’t have to bother anymore.

I submitted an idea, I presented the perceived problems and the suggested solution. It was dismissed out of hand, since I didn’t provide enough viable solutions. They didn’t take it as a suggestion and try to develop a different solution, and they didn’t come back to me to come up with other solutions. We have one department creating documentation and another using the documentation, but no way for the users to comment on the effectiveness of the documentation. I had suggested a formal mechanism to allow the users and the writers to communicate and ensure each group understood the needs and roles of the other. The response was, “[We] reject this issue. … It would probably be best to re-examen [sic] the issues that you raise, and try to identify how we can substantiate that they are actually issues, then propose solutions for each.”

The way to substantiate them as issues is to solicit feedback from the affected stakeholders and allow the stakeholders to develop viable solution to the individual issues. As I suggested. Seriously, if you don’t want to solve the problems, don’t ask for input.