Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Lesson
Continue":
"I think perhaps an impediment to staff buying in , might
be the process makes no effing sense."
I wrote the original comment,
thanks for publishing it.
Your comment above however is one that I also
hear every day. It is usually heard from staff who are supposed to be using a
software package. They typically do not like change. They do not understand the
need for the software. This is where management has failed. Management has to
explain from top to bottom what the software will do. How it will do it and why
you have to do what you have to do.
If you never understood how a car
works, it may make no effing sense that you need to pour a liquid into a hole in
the car.
**************
Thank you for giving us the benefit of your experience.
I think your last sentence is completely pertinent to the situation.
I am of course not an employee. But I think, if I found a simple task taking longer and less work being completed in a day because useless information that has to be fed into a computer. I might not be persuaded to understand the merits.
As a Councillor. I would view it no more sympathetically.
It's good to be able to talk when the only objective is exchange of information.
We need to be able to connect the dots.
Before management can educate employees of the benefit of change they need to understand what the employees is doing in the first place.
The region manager is positive about the program. I tend to think it might be a better fit for the regional operation. Tasks undertaken in a particular operation are I imagine repetitious in nature.
Work orders in a small urban operation are likely to be myriad and anything but repetitious.From collecting beer bottles or broken glass in a park, to expunging graffiti from a cut stone wall supporting the railway bridge at the south end of town.
Which I brought to the town's notice weeks ago and it's still there.
Neither task has anything to do with maintenance or condition of infrastructure. But very much to do with service expected by the community. .
From my conversation with the Region, it seems adaptations have had to be made in terms of extra staff to make the system work.There is acknowledgement, it has been a long time .
The time schedule provided to AUrora Council does not seem realistic. Three months after the original purchase was approved, Council was asked to approve an additional $38,000. that had been overlooked in the original purchase package.
The system couldn't be set up without it.
How many more unexpected demands are likely to be made.
When can we expect the sytem to be operational?
A car without fuel has no useful purpose. It ain't goin' nowhere.
A computer program without useful data is equally without purpose
Surely the playground toy - "camel" - that was the subject of so much discussion and several delegations to Council on account of an under-aged child falling from it, is an asset. Was the cost of councillors' time in listening to the delegations "capitalized" and added to the original cost?
ReplyDeleteWhat about a repair to three park benches. Is this cost going to be added to their value as town assets. Will the addition be only for parts or also for town labour?
Is every town employee going to carry some sort of device on which can be recorded the item involved and the work carried out? And will this then be sent through the ether to the town's new non-functioning asset control and inventory software?
Are we certain it will go to the right place? If it doesn't it might be lost forever, or else inflate something else while in the process of understating the repaired item.
How is it possible to spend upwards of $750,000 for something that no one understands, much less knows how to operate it?
I would like to know the names of those members of staff involved in investigating, recommending and implementing this software program and their expertise in this area. If it was the work of a consultant what are this person's qualifications and how did he/she come to find poor innocent Miss Aurora, standing helplessly and haplessly waiting to be rescued by a golden knight on horseback?
Or was this no knight, but an evil wizard instead?
I am struggling valiantly to keep up with all this verbiage about IT technology. What does seem increasingly obvious is that everyone agrees that the system is not working, may never work and might not be the right product. Can we leave it at that and try to clean up the resultant waste so as to stop spending more money stupidly? That was, after all, a large part of why the current Council was elected. Otherwise we are simply replacing excessive legal bills with over-the-top tech bills.
ReplyDeleteMost things these days come with basic instructions, how to set it up & what to expect. We should require the same from consultants flogging systems. A no brainer. You can't keep jacking up the price & blaming the customers. Council went meekly down the garden path into the weeds. Now they need to whack their way out & not let it happen again. This is not a NEW council anymore.
ReplyDelete