Bureaucracies beyond reproach
I've been musing on bureaucracies recently, from the point of view that those who say that they are a necessary evil are half right.
Seth Godwin notes that members of the bureacracy seek to be beyond reproach. In other words the prime objective is to avoid failure (or at least avoid being blamed for failure). As the bureacracy "learns" from mistakes, more and more procedures are instigated to avoid repeating failures. Very soon the cost of avoiding failures rises above the potential cost of the failure.
For example consider the development team (*) 8 months into a project and four months away from their first scheduled release that have not written a line of code because no-one dare make a decision on what technology to use.
* real story, but at a friend of a friend's company
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1 Comments:
Interesting comment Paul. I face a similar situation on my current project. For a 3 man dev team we report to roughly 7 senior people who dip in and out of the project as and when they see fit. All of them have different agendas, noone wants to accept responsibility, oh and by the way its the dev team's fault if things screw up! Resistance is futile...
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