“When sales in a brothel drop, you have to change the workers, not rearrange the beds” © (some kind of anecdote).
That's it, enough quotes and philosophies. I'll tell you how the beds were rearranged in one nice and cozy company. There was no need to feed them straight with bread, just let the cribs move.
Supply
The enterprise, as long as it existed, had a supply problem. Its essence was very simple: the buying dudes did not work well. We need to order today - they will last a week. It is easier and cheaper to buy in a neighboring city - they will order in the Far East. It takes one hundred sleeves, they will definitely order either ten or a thousand.
Everyone knew what the problem was - the suppliers, the sellers, the production, and the management. But somehow ... You can't come and kick people in the head? Everything must be done smartly. Through organizational change.
The favorite business of managers in village factories is to change the organizational structure of the enterprise. But our heroes decided that it was too time-consuming - to draw and approve a new structure, draw up personnel transfers, redo a bunch of pieces of paper like processes and regulations on departments.
Therefore, we decided to simply change the names of departments on the signs. A kind of light restructuring. They came up with names, printed them on ordinary A4 sheets, unscrewed old plates and turned the corridors of the plant management into social security. The Supply Department became the Logistics Department, the Sales Department became the Customer Department, and so on.
We sat and waited - no, it doesn't work. Everything needs to be changed.
It is not excluded that the programmer took part further, since it was decided to change the "metadata of the organizational structure" - in the title "Supply Department" it is necessary to change not the word "supply", but the word "department". And there was a funny leapfrog.
First, we chose the simplest - "service". And it sounds more solid, and kind of hints that you need to serve. For about a year there were services, but it did not work. Then they decided that there was nothing to plant here - departments, services, a radical solution was needed. Let there be departments.
The department is already beautiful, in the western way. We changed the organizational structure, sat down to wait. Damn, it doesn't work again. You need something even cooler and more inspiring. We decided that there would be divisions. "Supply division" - what does it sound like, huh? A ready-made title for a new Christopher Nolan film.
But, alas, this did not help either. However, hope was kindled again: a clever man came out into the light of day, who said - you have dividing names, but you need unifying names. For example, "department" - from the word "divide", "department" - from the English "part" (part), and "division" - in its pure form division ("division"). It was probably a programmer too.
We decided - stop sharing. Let there be "teams". But they quickly changed their minds - they felt ashamed in front of the outside world. Imagine a client arrives for negotiations, a person meets him and says: "I am Vasya, from the sales team." They don't like them in the village.
We realized that the approach did not work. Everything needs to be changed.
Now a serious reorganization has already begun. We began to rearrange people and change the configuration of departments. There were about five supplyers, and the question arose - on what basis should they be divided? A smart dude came and said - now the so-called. "Category purchase". Like Vasya is responsible for the category “Casting and Forgings”, Gena for “Hardware”, and Valya for “Rolled metal (including sheet metal)”, etc. And so they shared. Into five departments.
Immediately, of course, they indicated that each department would grow, there would be a chief, his own office, etc. Well, so that people don't worry. However, fortunately, the experiment did not last long - only a few months.
We realized that it wasn’t working and we had to change everything.
Divided according to another criterion - serial and custom nomenclature. Serial is everything that is produced by different factories and can be bought at any time. Customized, respectively - what is not in the warehouse and must be ordered in advance.
Summed up a theoretical foundation - read the article by Eric Trist, how he put in order by dividing and rearranging the mine. Now everything was exactly according to the mind - people are divided according to the fundamental difference in the energy structure of daily activities. Whatever that means.
However, it didn't help. We realized that everything had to be changed.
Then someone read a book about business units. We decided that, of course, we should also have business units, matrix management, and even better - project management. But this is in the distant future.
A business unit within a factory is when a couple of salespeople, a couple of suppliers and, say, a design engineer are put into one department. It turns out a small team, within which there are no borders, obstacles, bureaucracy, etc. Each business unit does something of its own - either a product, or a region, or a clientele. Here they were divided according to the product line.
And all "it is not clear who" is put in the so-called. Corporate Center, aka KC. Accountants, programmers, economists, lawyers, etc. Well, and accordingly, the CC is "in the service" of business units, providing them with services. Approximately how the state is in the service of citizens and business.
In general, three suppliers were seated according to business units, two were left in the corporate center - for the purchase of "general nomenclature". Each business unit has a boss. And, as luck would have it, all the bosses were salespeople. The very ones who throughout the history of the company have faced the problem of Uncle Fedor - in order to sell something, you have to buy it. And who bought from us the wrong thing and not then, we already know.
Inside the business unit, shortly, the old suppliers of suppliers ceased to function. The sales manager spoke clearly what to buy, how much, and when. And the supplier does not know how, he has something like submission dyslexia. The guys in the business units howled.
And for those who stayed at the CC, everything was as before - comfortable and calm. Well, after a couple of months of torment, the guys from the business units also asked for the CC. They even summed up some justification - they say, the procurement should be centralized, this is a modern trend, there is nothing to duplicate functions. An example was given - one supplier receives orders from different business units, and ships at an inflated price due to small batch sizes. The idea of an excuse was taken from the MBA, which was then studied by the most important supplier.
So what to do? We transferred all the suppliers to the CC. Then the designers. Only salespeople remain in the business units. The whole point was lost, and we returned to the initial stage of the experiment - just departments. True, they did not continue the experiment. We just resigned ourselves and got lost in the crisis.
IT specialists
In parallel, there were IT specialists - programmers and system administrators. At first, they somehow worked - well, at random, without any task managers and ITILs. They worked frankly badly, exactly as is customary at factories - to the level of "so as not to be fired."
Having looked at the suppliers and the rearrangement of their beds, they realized - this is it! Stop listening to what IT people are bad, you need to change everything.
We decided so - there is nothing for us, IT specialists, to call on the phone and yell that the printer does not work, the report is not being generated or an application does not come from the site. If you want an IT specialist to do something, write a memo. Now everything will be serious for us.
We went to the director and substantiated the changes. It was difficult to argue - the point is precisely the lack of records and approval, and not in any way the poor work of IT specialists. The director, knowing and sincerely loving the ISO 9001 standard, which states that "the process must always be recorded," approved the approach.
Naturally, the indulgence immediately passed - all the current tasks were forgotten, the rotten delay became fresh again. If someone wants his old task to be completed, let him write a slug.
People are not fools, and they gladly began to rivet service notes. IT specialists had to pull out an old dusty table from the server room in order to stack tons of paper on it - nothing could fit in the desk drawers for a long time. However, the shouts and swearing about “IT people work like they’ve piled in their pants” rose with renewed vigor.
Ok, the IT specialists announced, there is a problem, everything needs to be changed. The root of the problem is that the service files are paper. It is stupidly not clear what and when to do, and how to control all this.
Decision? Automate memos! Two birds with one stone perished at once - IT specialists received two indulgences. First, the automation must first be done - and this, "you understand", is not so easy. The system should be flexible, customizable, convenient and transparent. Secondly, it is no longer possible to perform the slugs. And there are no tasks in the system, because there is no system yet.
It took six months to develop the system. Started with fanfare, failed miserably. Another six months corrected the jambs. The people were seething - it was not possible to issue a service in the system for revision of the service system.
By the time the system started working normally, it was already clear that it needed to be changed. IT specialists, just in case, sprinkled ashes on their heads, and said there was no need to develop a system. We must use the ready-made, of which there are a million. This is the problem, not that IT people do not work well. Everything must be changed.
We took a break to find a ready-made solution. Three months later, they chose Bitrix - the cheapest box for deploying a corporate portal. Another three months were deployed and set up. Although here, perhaps, I agree: it is not the IT specialists who are to blame. Three months to unfold the Bitrix box and bring it to a working state is still godly.
All this time they lived as they got. Someone pushed the service records into the old system, some typed, and the most arrogant in the old fashioned way called and yelled.
When the corporate portal on Bitrix started working, history repeated itself. The overload of tasks that managed to live in the heads, on a dusty table, in an automated system, amicably moved to the famous "flexible adaptive interface".
With "flexibility" and "adaptability" we were poking around for about six months. On the way, we realized that the dusty table and service rooms would have more flexibility. It was especially helpful that no one among IT specialists knew PHP, so they only poked into the configuration forms with the mouse. Nobody was in a hurry, because while “the system is being configured and implemented”, it is not particularly necessary to solve current tasks.
They spat on Bitrix somewhere at the moment "it was not possible to set up notifications in mail, it looks like a bug in the platform." We realized that the system is not suitable for manufacturing enterprises. It is necessary to change something, radically.
We took a month to analyze the situation. Someone told IT guys about Scrum: whiteboard, stickers, flexibility, no computer systems. They had never rearranged the beds in such a way. For some reason we decided to try Scrum. It is necessary to change radically.
We immediately ran into a problem - Scrum is launched in one day. There are stickers, markers too, and the white board from the meeting room has long been lying around in the server room. They dragged out, hung up, and drove. In the sense they sat down and began to wait for tasks.
The first screaming man ran in, outlined the problem, wrote it down on a sticker, and hung it up on the board. Oddly enough, they immediately went to do it. While we were walking, a couple more people came running - they also removed the tasks, wrote them down and pasted them. It was time for dinner, got together and went to eat.
When they returned, they almost fell: the whole board was covered with stickers - yellow, pink, white, blue. Someone stuck an A4 sheet of paper with a printed sheet on the magnet. Several stickers lay on the floor, under the board, with traces of soles.
The whole plant had lunch, so they decided this: if I didn't see it, then it wasn't. They took off all the stickers and pieces of paper, ran into the smoking room, threw them into the trash can and burned them. The remaining half of the day had a row with two categories of citizens: some yelled “where is my pink sticker?”, Others - “let me stick it!”. Scrum didn't live until morning.
It was jointly decided that Scrum is not suitable for manufacturing plants. This is entertainment for hipster startups, in which people just pout their cheeks and don't want to work, so they invent adventures with stickers. We are serious people, we need a System.
We sorted out Issues in GitHub (?!), Jira, 1C: Document flow, some ITIL product, tasks in Outlook, Bitrix24, Trello, Yandex.Tracker, Kanban (with a fence around the board), we made another system of our own.
In general, we tried many options for arranging beds. These manipulations took several years, using the same algorithm. We admit that the old system or methodology will not work. Everything must be changed. We take time to analyze the market and select a new system. Then - for its implementation and configuration. We teach users. Launches. We get the same shaft of tasks that quickly turns red. We return to the initial stage.
And they worked as before - up to the level that they would not be fired.
Director
And finally, another fan of rearranging beds - the director. His favorite path was pay and motivation systems.
In simple terms, the problem was that the director paid little - everyone, including his deputies. But he understood in time the key strategy that I had heard many times since 2006 in the village factories. Now I will briefly explain, just do not show your director.
We need to constantly change the payment system. The goal is to pay less. But people should feel that they are getting more.
It is done very simply - through a system of bonuses, grades or, best of all, KPI (KPI).
At the very beginning there were salaries, some, like salespeople, had bonuses. After a while, the director got into an unpleasant situation. On the one hand, the salaries have not changed for a long time, and people began to grumble, poison stories about "companies in which they index every year." On the other hand, he and the current payroll were already straining - they wanted to reduce it.
So he decided to change everything. Made KPIs for everyone, from the deputy director to the cleaning lady. The salary was divided into a salary (about half of the previous salary), and a bonus based on performance. Naturally, the ironclad rule of introducing the new KPI system was observed: it allowed, purely theoretically, to get more, by about 30%.
This figure (30%) was constantly voiced by the director: I, being so good, have increased your salary by 30%, and you do not want to work. In fact, of course, people began to receive around 70% of the previous level of income. But it was impossible to get to the bottom.
Dissatisfied that you get little? So you did not receive, but came to earn. So make money. I, the director, cannot work for you, I create opportunities, conditions and prospects. Work and be happy.
People gradually got used to unnatural indicators, such as "No comments on cleanliness in public places", somehow they agreed - they stopped spoiling each other's life, and half and half went to the previous level of income.
The director noticed this and decided to change everything. It was too lazy to mess around, so I just came up with other indicators without fundamentally changing the whole system. The payroll decreased again, and for some time the director lived in peace.
When people learned to retrain to new indicators in one month, the director had to strain himself, come up with and implement a grading system. Now there was a salary again, but its size depended on the grade - this is the type of specialist category. Naturally, at the start of the system, everyone was assigned the lowest grade - past merits were not taken into account. To change is to change.
If you follow the director's strategy, the main thing when introducing grades is to make the algorithm for raising the level as complex and incomprehensible as possible. What to do, how to prepare, what results to show, to whom to pass the exam, where to bring the chocolate - nothing was known. The director said - we'll see for 2-3 months how the implementation of the system goes and we will decide.
Six months later, he hired the girl personally to report to himself, named her "Qualifications Manager", ordered her to come up with an algorithm for increasing the grades and implement it. Not that he ordered - rather suggested, or recommended. In order not to be in a hurry.
By the time the algorithm was ready, the director again decided that everything had to be changed. The legs of the beds creaked again on the old battered floorboards. This time - towards cost accounting.
PS
I do not exclude that all the problems of the enterprise, and specifically of the suppliers and programmers, were caused by the director's love for rearranging beds. What do you think?