This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by grzegorzgrzegorz
Imagine the company which is delivering water from point A to B. This is their business value and customers are paying for this huge amount of money. You are coming there as a new hire and notice they are using buckets. They pile them up for few months: fill them with water and put them on the huge trolley truck. At some point of time they move it by hands to point B. All the buckets are constantly leaking. Strange thing.
Soon, some meeting starts, it is time for you to act.
“Hey guys your buckets are leaking!”, you are so proud you can immediately contribute, “let’s seal them up and then maybe we could think of some more automatic way of moving them between the points”. Yes, it was easy, they are lucky they hired you.
You spot bored faces of the people, some of them are smiling. This tall guy always speaks up, no matter what is the topic. Yes, he is not going to let you down:
“Well, we are doing our business the right way. Of course, there is always a room for improvement but we are in the middle of delivery these days. We don’t have time for anything apart from refilling the buckets and pushing the trolley”.
“I understand, but this is far away from industry standards. Do you know that industry is measuring things like the time of delivering single bucket with water, how often is the delivery coming, how often water doesn’t meet the quality standard and how fast you can stop the spoiled delivery?”. Leaking buckets are strange but this seems to be even more weird.
“We have different specifics here, you see. We are delivering every few months”, senior manager starts to explain, “also, we are not responsible for buckets as we get them from other team. If you want to talk about buckets you need to communicate with them. As you know we are already late with the delivery and have no time for theoretical discussion. The water quality team is probing the water from all the buckets – do you imagine how many of them we have? It is a huge work. We need to refill if something is wrong and just after they finish, we push everything to point B”. This starts to sound consistent in some twisted way.
“Ok, the delivery is so important. Maybe we can put some oil to the bearings? It would make the pushing action lighter? Quick action with some immediate effect, what you say?”, you try to play their game.
“That is a great idea. Just please contact the team who is doing oilling stuff as you have no privilege to do it alone”, senior manager explains politely but it seems he starts to look little bit annoyed.
It feels at this point like you are from different planets.
“Why don’t we have team responsible specifically for delivering buckets with water? There are separate, functional teams here and you have to wait forever for every small single action needed to make the delivery as there are teams responsible for details but none of them for the business value!”. You know you said too much but you feel helpless. No people are smiling now and almost everybody looks nervous.
“This is my last answer. I am sorry, we cannot let you undermine our work”, senior manager is very professional, “we may have some slowdowns and other imperfect things but we are not responsible for teams. You have to talk to someone else about it. Meanwhile, let’s get back to water quality.”
It is the real life example of how badly company can act. More important however is the question: why is it not possible to fix the buckets not to mention any other more important improvement? The answer is because it is all about politics. Without the ability to persuade people and unite them under the idea, it is not possible to bring it to life. It doesn’t matter if the idea is stupid or extremely useful for company: status quo can only be changed when you have the majority which supports your idea. You need to approach persons individually and only after they are on your side you can try to start the topic officially. If you are not good politician, the buckets will always leak.
If you are CEO, VP or the owner of the company you have the power to change things alone, but didn’t you have to be a good politician to get to this point anyway ?
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by grzegorzgrzegorz