Anyone else come across this fuck-wittery? Where I used to work (a well known brand most of you will know) Lean was introduced.

This basically meant taking all the dross who were useless at their jobs and/or had a bad attitude towards work, or useless wannabe fuckwits, and recruiting them into the Lean team. They were sent off all around europe to various Lean academies. They all came back a bit weird, and suddenly all were in management jobs. Needless to say the place went to pot, and moral nose-dived across the whole site, as these idiots put their ideas into practice. I saw how things were going and got the heck out of there. This is common in industry and other work places these days, and stinks of Common Purpose to me. The idea is to cut out bad practices and ways of working, so ok they managed to cut the number of people on the shop floor, only to be replaced by more tiers of management who just have meeting after meeting. Cunts!

Seen it going on for donkeys years.
It starts with the public sector and businesses associated with it and 'standards' get produced which they want all staff to get qualified at and adhere to.
In IT for example the obvious one is ITIL. Its a degree in complete bullshit
Try one of the many mock ITIL tests online and laugh your ass off at the questions.

Barely enough people to run the place at weekends and on nights. Yet Monday to Friday, 8 to 4, loads and loads of people crunching newly invented statistics, layers of BS you wouldn't believe, and of course having lots of meetings about these made-up figures.

I got a 'Lean' certificate in, at my last place, which is a recognised qualification in many industries. It was just a 2 or 3 day course in house, followed by an exam. It cracked me up though, because it was all just common sense stuff about streamlining processes & the like, yet the company's processes couldn't have been more ridiculous if their sole aim had been to squander money & maintain shambolic standards. It was one of those where they create lots of unnecessary acronyms for you to learn so that you can regurgitate the exact series of words they want to hear to describe various work practice concepts. A complete bore, and I can't remember any of it now, because it's not useful.

I think there were 3 you could take, and if you do it independently it's quite costly, but the company paid for us & forced us to do it. The levels were referred to as different coloured belts, like in martial arts, for no good reason. I think they become progressively more faffy & time consuming, in that you have to undertake some relevant, employer related project of your own design when you do the higher levels.

At one point, they were doing weekly spot checks on people, and your score was recorded on your personnel file. I actually kicked off about it & persuaded them to stop doing it. Fucking mithering you to quote pointless acronyms, while everybody had a backlog of 300 client queries in their email in-boxes and ledgers about 4 x the size the most efficient person in the world could handle effectively.

Thanks Gilly, I had managed to forget about those bloody acronyms, and phrases like "moving forward".......

I got bollocked once for asking a director to speak English in a meeting

The only one I remember is TIMWOOD - not that I recall what it stands for.

Yep, there was one area manager I used to work for, whose answer, on the rare occasions I asked assistance with a problem, was invariably, "Just tweak the key levers". Twit!

Its when you have meetings about meetings that things start to get scary crazy

jhado wrote:
I actually managed my own 'team' using lean principals and it worked well; very well in fact.
The opinion/perception is determined by which side of the fence you are on and your attitude really.
Broken down to basics the principals in lean manufacturing cover safety, cleanliness and a place/tool for everything within easy reach... no?
Less waste and downtime being the goal.

You mention that the dross and useless were recruited onto a team - and for that I have to agree to a degree.
Management (from what I witnessed) tended to choose workers that were already on their last legs as employees for one reason or another. Give them a structure and if they can't or won't follow it....... bye bye.

Just as a quick explanation / example:
1.) A shop floor worker may like the fact that s/he can wander around the factory under the pretence of looking for that airline - spanner - hoist etcetera. It's their legitimised skive.
2.) Their oppo just wants to crack on with the job and would relish having that particular tool at hand rather than traipsing around the factory looking for it.
Same scenario - two different workers with different attitudes.

The lengths some people would go to in order to sabotage the very thing that made their job easier beggared belief.

You also have to bear in mind that often, lean manufacturing is brought in as a last ditch attempt to save a factory - so it's not always the process that failed if the company folds anyway, it may have been implemented too late.

I kid you not, I was once reprimanded for raising something in a meeting that hadn't been agreed for discussion in the pre-meeting meeting.

This epitomises what I hate about the big companies i've worked for.

A fortnight into my new job & I'm happier with my million lever arch files and management who just leave me alone to get on with it, and have so far keenly taken up every suggestion I've made on how to improve processes. It appears to be a BS-free zone.

Weeman wrote:
Fair comment Weeman, but what about when ignoramuses start telling technical people, specialists in their field, how to do their job?

Not easy to answer because you probably have an example to recall whereas I'm seeing two sides.

Telling a specialist in a technical capacity their job would be outrageous.
Telling them that their 'specialist' status doesn't earn them the right to disregard H&S is another.

Give me an example...

I have to say, Weeman, that I can see it working in the right environment.

My gripe was the surrealness of being put on the course when we were already totally ignored by senior management when regularly highlighting a whole multitude of ways things could be changed with no cost or disruption, to make the running of the place substantially more effective.

And the nonsensical way they chose to misinterpret the spirit of the material was also a joke. So they'd produce a 'lean' layout for your desk, with a template of where your mouse should be kept, in relation to your monitors, and where exactly in your drawer your stapler would be etc etc.

They stopped harassing me about it when 2 department managers came to check my desk was 'lean', and I lost my temper.

I told them that when the person on the other end of the phone was frothing at the mouth, it was because they'd been billed wrongly, due to a whole host of systems that seemed designed to cock things up a treat for the customers. Not one of our customers had ever had a screaming fit because I had a photo of my kids on my desk or my stapler was in the 'wrong' side of the fricking drawer. I made some remarks too about the backlog of some of my payment office queries that possibly resulted from the dept manager not driving efficient time-scales for completion, because she was too busy floating about measuring the distance between people's biros in their pen pots.

Its about common sense really and the replacement of it with standards training.
If someone needs training in common sense then they shouldn't have been hired.

The workplace nowadays has arbitrary pay scales too. There are people doing highly skilled work that requires some rather expensive training and qualifications getting less than people in jobs that require little to no training.

Again, messing with the market, screwing things over, again and again. Government.

The laugh of it is there are examples of better reward for time and skills in the armed forces than the private sector, eg a time served nco can earn just as much or even more than many an officer.
Its all about recognition of input and its sorely lacking. We see guys toiling away emptying bins for 18k and guys in hospital admin getting 78k.

Thats just fucked up and there's no excuse for it. It SHOULD be the other way around lol.
We all know this its obvious, so in your face and its just another one of those things that pisses us off.
So binmen might not have a degree...so what? Their job is truly important to the nations welfare, not just that but the supermarkets welfare because they produce half the shit that needs clearing in the first place. They go out in all weathers and in awkward hours handling stinking hazardous waste. They have the balls to do the job and as such deserve a decent reward for it.

If they went on strike for a month we'd be knee deep in streets full of rats, another month we'd have plague conditions ffs

There's numerous other examples too and I get sick of seeing it.
It used to be the case that working for the council was an honest and well rewarded job, now its all outsourced and they don't give a fuck anymore. Bus drivers, binmen and on and on and its all gone to shit. Bus drivers now get minimum wage too, whats all that about?
Responsibility for perhaps as much as a 100 or more lives a trip, one of the toughest driving tests in the world and they get £8 an hour or whatever ffffssssssss....
WHat about the...gah gonna cut myself short or I'll go Alex Jones supersaiyan

@ Gilly.

That lean certificate (three day thing is worthless). True, it's a recognised qualification but they are handed out like toffees - effectively making them worthless. Like you say - it's mainly a certificate for a common sense approach.
And yeah, those acronyms were irritating..... *shudders at the thought*

@andyh

I'm not going to quote your post #14 but nail on the head fella.
I'm going to have to work on my typing speed - this is becoming more than a hindrance when expressing my view.
Time - never enough bloody time.

Did you all do the red tag thing?

It was worse than useless at that particular company, because they took the piss with their inefficiency, and regular introduction of extra, new, pointless steps in every procedure, that spread ownership around to the extent that nothing was ever completed and nobody could be held accountable.

We were dealing with millions of £'s worth of commercial debt, a staggering proportion of which wasn't even real, because when you spent hours / days / weeks unravelling what was, in some cases a 'debt' that had shown on an account for literally years, it was down to misallocations, and incorrect billing where services should have been cancelled but weren't - due to inefficiencies that could easily be pinpointed, but were never addressed, no matter how much you tried to draw attention to them.

And then, just as you were at the last leg of resolving the problems for a customer who might have 100+ accounts - what did the bastards do? Switch everybodies ledgers around so that someone else would have to start again from scratch on what you'd been working on, and you'd get a fresh batch of accounts that you couldn't make heads or arseholes of what the last controller had done with it - or more commonly, the last person (and the one before & the one before) had done bugger all beyond establish that the customer didn't intend to pay because they didn't believe they owed anything.

Very frustrating indeed.

Weeman wrote:
With me it was always dilbert crap.
Project charts and powerpoint presentations when simply a quick minute or two's words face to face or an email would suffice.
Not that people bother to read emails properly either but thats another whole story.

This is why we have project managers basically, a useless job intended to distance the top from the guys who do the work because they just can't stand talking to us. They want yes men and their business bollocks and they pay the 'project manager' more than the sys admin of course....
Again thats another example of paying someone in a useless role more than the one who actually holds things together, if their computers don't work and backups don't get done then they're finished. I spend more time sorting out ****heads who don't know a power lead from a network cable than I do day2day core basics but thats par for the course.