I keep stirring shit up

Wednesday and Thursday were days that I Stirred Shit Up at the Empire—in a good way.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a representative to a council where level-one floor technicians get to meet managers at the grandboss and great-grandboss levels to explain just what technical or mechanical stuff on the floor hobbles us, handicaps us, or just chaps our asses as we try to do our jobs.  Remarkably, the damned thing works.  Several policy and procedure changes in the last year that did make our lives better came from gripes and ideas first floated in tech council.

At last Tuesday morning’s breakfast meeting (hey, they even agree to feed us at these things; this week was breakfast tacos and coffee), one of the points that came up—again—was the problem of the tool we use to locate and pick our spare parts for service dispatches.  A number of the part descriptions are confusingly similar, and those similarities cause mistakes in picking parts, which cause repeat service calls, which annoy the customers and waste everyone’s time.  One big obstacle to fixing this problem is that the tool doesn’t “belong” to us, in corporate terms.  It belongs to one of the inventory management groups, which allows us to piggyback just for the ride.  The confusing part descriptions don’t bother the parts planners, it seems; they’re used to it.  It just bothers the hell out of us.

So the issue of bad or confusing part descriptions causing RDs (repeat dispatches) came up yet again, and everyone agreed it was a problem, and the same proposals were floated yet again:  build a tool of our own that presents the spares-list information in a form useful to us, or find someone high enough up the company to tell them to fix it, goddamn it, and then make the fix happen.  Both of these proposals have problems.  The first requires committing money and resources, and the second causes bad blood between operating units.

The very next morning I got another wrong-part RD.  Last week I had to order a docking-station monitor stand to replace a failed one, and when I went to the spares list, there were two nearly identical part descriptions.  In the verbose part of the description, both parts were described as monitor stands.  The hook came in the cryptic parts-planner piece of the description where a five-character string differentiated a monitor stand from a notebook system stand.  Very different items, very different function, almost identical description.  For the life of me I couldn’t figure out which one I should pick, so in the end I guessed.

I guessed wrong.  Yesterday I got an email from the customer saying, “Hey Sam, you sent us a notebook stand but we needed a monitor stand.  Will you sort this out for us?”  I swore about the goddamn lousy part descriptions in the spares list, dispatched the right one to the customer, and then sent an email to everyone who’d been at the tech council meeting, techs and managers alike.  I pasted in the two part descriptions from the spares list, explained that I’d gotten an RD hit because of it and why, and generally acted like Michael Palin in the muckrakers scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Did you see that?  That’s what I’m on about!  Did you see ’im repressin’ me?”).

This set something off.  Across eight or nine emails that morning I watched the cc: list on the replies get longer and longer as more and more managers and analysts were hauled into the process.  Finally, right before lunchtime someone from the product group wrote a completely dismissive email to the effect of “you can’t do anything about it, the description fields are too limited, somebody else will have to deal with this problem, and anyway this can’t REALLY be a problem because if it was a problem, we would have heard about it back in 2003 when this model was introduced.”  I replied, “This class of incident has been a problem since 2003 to my personal knowledge, and I’m sure it was even before that.  The difference is that hitherto level-1 technicians had no effective way to pass their concerns back up to the people with the ability to make things change.  Instead, they grumbled and swore and patched together workarounds, sharing tribal knowledge to cope with the status quo as best they could.  Now we have a conduit to make our concerns heard, we’re voicing those concerns, and you’re learning of long-extant issues that have created a significant backlog of resentment on the call center floors.”  I got a thundering silence back from him, and a back-channel email from my great-great-grandboss saying “Nice response, Sam.”

And then, and THEN!  Today about mid-morning my phone rang with a direct-dial call to my extension.  I picked up and found my great-great-great-grandboss (a vice president) on the line, congratulating me for raising all these important issues and providing good examples, and encouraging me to keep bringing them forward.  He told me he was asking (sc. ordering) some heavier hitters from the organization that owns the spares-list tool to call and talk with me directly, because he thought they needed to hear what I had to tell them.  Later in the day, another team manager on my floor came over to shake my hand.  He told me that G-G-G-Gboss had stood up on his hind legs in a big-assed meeting full of senior and area managers and preached them a sermon about me and my email, saying my case was an example of how they all needed to be doing a better job of supporting the front-line guys and if we could let this kind of problem go on for three years without fixing it, how did they think we could fix the really BIG problems when they came along?  Even later, Great-Great-Grandboss told me there’d been a squabble in email Wednesday I hadn’t seen, over who was supposed to bell the cat fix my particular part description issue, and in the end he’d had to be Zeus on Olympos and thunder “I don’t care WHO does it, but I want those descriptions fixed before day’s end or I’ll know the reason why!”

So now I’m working out the kinks of scheduling ongoing biweekly meetings with the product group to provide them front-line input from the Services organization about how what they do affects us.  That’ll probably take a run or two at it, and someone may have to go sit on the queue watch staff’s heads to keep them from howling if I have to go to meetings during the blackout period when Nobody Must Schedule Any Meetings for Any Reason Whatever so all the techs will be available on the phones.

Jesus god.  These people are listening to me.

A slate shingle camera mis-identifies the Akhoond of Swat.  Fnord.