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I might just be the least processy person you know. When I hire new people, I warn them that I’m a morning person so they know when to ask for a raise. And I (only) semi-jokingly tell them that their performance rating will drop if they ever put a Gantt chart in front of me. Gantt charts, horizontal bar charts for project management, make my eyes bleed. It’s an allergic reaction. Some people are chemically sensitive in their workplace, I’m like flow-chart sensitive. Gantt charts are hard to read, and they assume that the future will be how you expect it to be. The truth is, few projects can be scheduled/predicted more than two weeks out. They are wild guesses to begin with and then they change. I don’t think the chart changes my steps or my work, so they seem frivolous and unnecessary to me.
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In my leadership team meeting today, my boss was saying that we should do better at managing the changes that impact our sites…that every new initiative should have VOC (Voice of the Customer) and a deployment and engagement plan. She wants more rigor in how we launch initiatives. One of my best friends has saved everything from his years with the company and he’s that one person in every company who can extract stuff from his files that we did years ago. So Jason (not his real name) pulls out a 7-page procedure called FLIPS: Flawless Introduction of Products and Services. It is both a thing of brilliance and very scary. It takes seven pages to say that a person with an idea has to fill out a form answering lots of questions about the idea and then the leadership team decides whether the project can proceed. And it’s got a complex flow chart to go with it.
Can’t we just promise to do better rolling out new initiatives and skip the bureaucracy?
Can’t we just promise to do better rolling out new initiatives and skip the bureaucracy?