Tiny Bandaids

When I worked for a medical company, we delivered to hospitals all across the country.

Hospitals are Important. Hospitals take care of the people who we love.

The lights Must stay on.

The trucks Must drive.

The orders Must be picked.

The system Must work.

Always.

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We had been trying to enter into the the Long Term Care market, not just Hospitals.

Grandparents. Parents. Vulnerable loved ones.

When we finally did enter into that market, we added Advanced Wound Care products to our product offering.

Bed sores.

Pressure wounds.

Flesh that has worn all the way through to the bone.

Bone infection.

Death.

...

When the New President came in and our executive team was fired, they hired a VP of HR from a company that ran a website.

They sold Ideas. They sold Other Peoples Talent. They were a job-search website. They made money by selling tiny electrons that danced across a computer screen.

We made money by selling Advanced Wound Care products, (among other things), and we owned warehouses, and trucks.

...

The VP of HR brought a few friends along, and they brought a few friends along, and soon most of the people with significant titles in the company ended up being a bunch of old buddies who used to run a web site together.

...

We had two people who supported the ERP system for a 1.2 billion dollar company, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

When the new VP of IT came along to join the Buddies - the observation was - "You guys needs more people in IT".

We agreed wholeheartedly.

So they hired a web developer. And a web project manager. And another web project manager. And a web director. And a business analyst who honestly seemed to be having trouble grasping it how it could possible that some of our products might ever be on backorder, ever.

And yet... we still had only two people supporting the ERP system that reliably processed eight million order lines a year.

...

Then they started firing the people who supported the core systems and the back-office processes.

Kicked me out of the department.

Fired the person in charge of the ERP team.

Openly 'talked trash' about people who reported into them.

And they did this right in front of other teams.

In the middle of meetings.

They cursed like sailors.

Regularly.

...in business conversations

They talked freely about their belief that the entire group of old timers were a bunch of has-beens who don't know how to run a business.

Even though we had grown it from 300 million to 1.2 billion.

Sure we had made some mistakes along the way.

But we were. Clearly

Inept.

...

They actively tried to prevent us from collaborating with each other.

Except for the website people, they could collaborate, of course. They NEED to Collaborate and they are mature enough to do so. They NEED shared workspaces and dedicated meeting rooms. The rest of us ... well... meetings are a waste of time and we should just shut up and do the work.

Quietly.

...

Why didn't we take this to to the VP of HR?

The VP of HR was their buddy.

Well, then... why didn't we take this to the President?

The President was the HR VPs buddy.

...

...

When I was in Junior Kindergarten I was playing quietly with a friend, and a kid who was regarded as a Bully came over to try to steal the toys we were playing with.

I asked him to stop.

I told him that he would have his turn.

He kept bullying us.

So I went to the teachers desk and explained what was happening.

She said...

.Nobody likes a tattle-tale.

I must have been about four years old.

...

Nobody likes a tattle-tale.

...

What in the world are we teaching our children?

...

We are teaching them that, the very same people who teach us about The Rules, don't take any action when The Rules are Broken.

That Bullying Behavior is tolerated.

Permitted.

Allowed.

That if the victim of the bullying complains to the authorities,

the Victim is Chastised,

instead of the Bully.

That the Bully gets to play with your stuff,

and it is up to you to go and find something else to do.

And by the way, you will get in trouble if you do not play nicely.

I was four years old.

...

They stand at the Front of the Class and preach The Golden Rule - Do Unto Others as You Would Do Unto Yourself.

But they turn a blind eye and walk away when The Golden Rule is broken.

...

Nobody likes a Tattle-Tale.

...

Why didn't you tell the President?

...

So - they launched a multi-million dollar project to rebuild the website. The majority of our business was with government buyers who needed three-way-checks on automated EDI orders and shipments and payments, etc, and these buyers had neither had the time nor the inclination to hunt and peck for bandaids on a web-site.

Even though the New Saved Order List is now much easier to use then the Old Saved Order List.

Good for you.

Congratulations.

Now if you don't mind, we need to go and run the business.

...

A big part of the justification for the investment in the web site was based on analysis which showed that millions of dollars worth of transactions from major hospital groups were all being done manually.

Just look at all the time we will save! Just look at all the money we will save by firing the Order Takers! Just look at how all of these people have been running the business in such an outdated way! Aren't you glad we saved the day? Yessiree, at a couple million dollars, this new web site is a practically a Steal, and we'll make the company tremendously more successful! You are welcome!!!

...

So, they took this story to the President, and the story was supported by a Very Sexy Powerpoint presentation with a lot of good-looking Charts and Graphs and Statistics and Benchmarks.

...

And the President took the presentation to The Big Boss In The United States, and they made the case for The Investment.

...

When they got back they finally shared the presentation, all happy about the shiny new website they were going to build. They sure were showing the old timers how to get things done! (You are welcome)

We all said... those numbers don't make sense. We all knew it, intuitively. We knew our business. We didn't need any detail to know right away that the numbers were just plain wrong.

So we asked to see the data.

Of course, they understand computers. Of course they understand analytics. "We pulled the numbers from your own database", they said. So there! Obviously, there was no need to do even a basic sanity check with any of the old timers before taking it to the Big Boss in the United States. Clearly.

But we all knew, immediately when we saw the presentation. Not one of us even had to think about it for a second.

Something is wrong, we said. Please go back and check your data.

It is correct, they said.

So, I was the one who checked their data.

---

Over time, people generally learned that if they ignore my polite suggestions for long enough, and if they ignore my offers to help for long enough, and if they reject my process ideas for long enough, and if they dispute my data for long enough, eventually, one way or another, they would probably end up doing what I very politely suggested they might consider doing in the first place, a long time ago, when I was still trying very hard to do things in a very collaborative and accepting and non-threatening manner.

Sometimes they finally clicked into what I was saying on their own.

Sometimes their way failed.

Sometimes the rest of the team convinced them.

Sometimes they were finally told - Just Do It.

I was never the one who said "Just Do It"

and I never breathed a word of "I told you so".

... everyone else did that for me ...

And we were right.

And we tried to tell you.

Nicely.

---

The website people didn't understand enough about the business processes to know how to ask the right questions in order to be able to correctly interpret what they were seeing.

And they clearly didn't follow even basic sanity checks to test their own assumptions about what they were were looking at.

So I helpfully explained the parts about the process that they had missed, and I showed where it was in the data analysis that had gone wrong, to help them avoid that particular pitfall, the next time.

And I quietly walked away.

I didn't have to say I told you so.

It was indisputable.

...

And it left them with A Very Big Problem about what to tell The Big Boss.

...

Yes, it was true that the website needed to be improved.

But the business case was bogus.

...

My colleague and I had designed that data warehouse, very specifically, so that anyone who understood the Business Process would be able to ask questions about the Business and fairly Quickly and Easily be able to Answer Questions to help make Better Business Decisions, without too much concern about hooking up the data incorrectly.

If you understood the business process, then you were good to go. And if you don't understand the processes, please ask. And if it is your first few times using it, please, my door is always open, I can take a quick look at the results just to confirm if there was anything else that needed to be considered.

Several folks who had worked at different companies agreed it was the easiest data warehouse they had ever used.

We built it with two people, from scratch, with a few textbooks, and about sixty thousand dollars in training and consulting fees, maybe less.

But.

They were the rock star computer people.

So THEY knew best.

...

So they kicked me off the team that I had been working with for over fifteen years.

And they invented a shiny new Director title to be responsible for the data warehouse.

And they hired one of their buddies to come and fill the role.

...

Why didn't you tell the President?

...

The next project that they handed me, was to onboard about 100 new EDI customers and, oh, I had to get it done in 60 days because they had already made commitments to The Big Boss about all the money they would save by fixing the glaring problem that Canada clearly does not do enough EDI and the website was a much better way to go anyways, much better than EDI.

...

This commitment was, of course, based on the data they interpreted incorrectly, from the data warehouse that I built, that they didn't bother to vett with anyone who was familiar with the business.

...

So.

Now they knew that The Big Opportunity that they had sold to the Big Boss didn't really exist.

But they were still on the hook to make it look as if they were delivering what they said they would.

...

We all told them that onboarding 100 EDI customers in 60 days was not a realistic goal. Not anywhere close.

We all told them that the timelines are dependant on our customers EDI capabilities and resource availability.

We all told them that we had approached these customers several times in the past, and that we continue to do so periodically.

We all told them that sending EDI is not like sending an email or creating a web form. It must integrate seamlessly with the business systems and the business processes of both the sender and the receiver.

So we negotiated.

We offered an alternative.

...

We knew that there was some very low-hanging fruit that would save a fair bit of time in the EDI processes, and that if we reassigned the project team to work on this low hanging fruit, we could fairly quickly get some good wins that would save time and improve accuracy. Yes, of course we would continue with the EDI onboarding, as we always do, BUT, out of necessity, it has to move at a much slower pace than what they had assumed could be done.

They agreed to re-assign the project resources.

So we spent a really intense week in a Kaizen process improvement event, did a tonne of analysis, came up with a lot of cool opportunities, really challenged ourselves to push the envelope to get to creative solutions that would solve some significant time-wasters for the huge number of existing EDI transactions.

We knew that we could deliver a meaningful improvement to the team, faster than the EDI onboarding ever could.

We worked late hours, we tossed around a lot of great ideas, and we were all excited about the work that we were assigning ourselves to do.

...

When they came to the project room for daily updates, they kept asking, Why we can't ALSO get all of the new EDI customers onboarded in the next 60 days, as well? If not a hundred, how about fifty? If not fifty, how about twenty?

They just didn't listen.

We were ALL telling them that it simply is not feasable. Every single one of us. From experience. Lots of experience. All of us.

The team had a lot of experience, and as it happens, in a past job, I had retooled the entire EDI system from the ground up for a Fortune 500 company that had such a large transaction volume they were the first company in the world to put the back-end SAP server onto a mainframe computer, because that was the only computer that would be big enough to handle the transaction volume.

But the website people knew better.

Six Weeks.

Get 'er done.

...

At the end of a Really Intense Week we stayed up for most of the night to work on the presentation and came into the Report Out room a bit breathless, but also excited with the great story we wanted to tell.

We shared the storytelling amongst the different team members, as often happens in good Kaizen Report Outs, because it helps showcase the team with some of the senior leadership and challenges them and helps them to build confidence and develop skills. We didn't really have much time to practice beforehand, as is typical in an intense Kaizen, but we knew we were onto something really good.

...

They were angry because the presentation was not polished enough.

...

So they sent a terse and nasty email to my boss, who showed it to me, and they declared that the project was a failure. We still would be expected to do the work, of course, but the project was a failure.

It hadn't even started yet.

...

This is the same guy who kicked me off my team, then begged to borrow me back to accomplish an impossible EDI feat to cover his own bogus business case because of bad analysis from my data warehouse that he did not involve me in, then expected me to to continue to lead the team through a project that he had already declared a failure.

...

My boss told me that I am too nice.

...

He is probably right.

...

Chastise the victim.

...

The Project Manager who they brought with them to rebuild the website was very nice, and in the first several months wasn't able to contribute very much materially, but spent the time learning the business and working with thier website friends to help to build a faulty business case, using my data, about processes that they did not understand.

...

About seven months into learning the business, they came running into a meeting room one day, all freaked out and sort of panicking and said

----' Shit just got Real !!! '---

then proceeded to very animatedly describe a presentation they had just seen from the Sales Team.

It was a presentation that was intended to be shown to Advanced Wound Care clinicians, to help them learn how our products could help to evolve clinical practice and to improve patient outcomes.

And the presentation included some Very Graphic Pictures of some Very Advanced Wounds.

---

Shit just got Real, they said.

---

They thought we sold tiny bandaids.

xxx\