Canadian Politics Today

I worked in government for a decade and a half. Most of my encounters with management were incredibly frustrating due to my innate desire to get things done and their innate desire to cover their fat asses and make sure they never got blamed for anything. Projects were even worse. I got handed a project once which made sooo much sense. Then I found out the project had been ongoing for two years and made no progress. Why? You needed buy-in from a vast group of people, none of whom were willing to commit time to do any work other than attend meetings. Why? Because while the project would benefit the whole agency, and in fact, the whole country, nobody wanted to be the one paying for it. The cost wasn't much, but even so, every directorate and every branch said "Why should I pay for it?" So I duly wrote up a detailed business plan, did lots of research, attended lots of meetings, and then handed it off to someone else when I got promoted a couple of years later. Meh. They're probably still puttering along. It was a project, incidentally, to use information in our computers to warn us of possible identity theft, which was then and remains a growing problem for the agency.

My friend at the RCMP spent three years working on a project they regarded as extremely important and put a lot of resources into. Then senior management changed and they decided to yank the budget.

Unaccountable management is a culture that is impossible to fix on ones own.  This, to me, is the #1 economic challenge today in a world where the business environment is maximally globalized and challenged by technology.  I tend to believe in Buckminster Fuller's assertion that it's easier to remake something by building a better model separately, then letting the first model fail on its own.

Middle and top managers in institutional environments are as difficult to root out as a 100-year old tree.

Your family??

Ouch.

Is it a small company ?  They are the worst. 

Certain types of companies are horrible, in my experience.  Canadian retail is one.  Education and non-profit is another.  The best are medium sized firms on the larger side IMO.

New Passport System $75M Over Budget

"The project management capacity and expertise was insufficient for the complexity and scale of the initiative."

"The reporting did not track project spending against budgeted activities," says the February 2016 audit report, adding the project "did not include a plan for security requirements."

This story is actually not bad for a business article.

My questions when I read this:

How did 'insufficient' project management get hired for this job ?
Why did nobody ask for project budget tracking ?
Why did nobody plan for security ?

I suspect I know the answer for some of these.

Doesn't this happen with troubling frequency when the federal government tries to design a software system?

 -k

Who is troubled ?  Certainly not the taxpayers.

Remember the loud cries over the $8 BILLION Ontario has spent to electronicize health records   That's right, you don't because it didn't happen.  The spending and failure did, but there was no outcry.

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/11/30/ontario-auditor-general-exposes-litany-of-government-snafus-in-annual-report.html

Ok, I guess not....

How about: debugging your production code:

https://twitter.com/zhobbs/status/1027211230149148672

Is it a small company ?  They are the worst. 

Certain types of companies are horrible, in my experience.  Canadian retail is one.  Education and non-profit is another.  The best are medium sized firms on the larger side IMO.

I would think the bigger you get in the private sector, the more efficient you have to be to compete because the money & stakes are higher.  There's lots of good small businesses, but also lots of bad ones, which is why so many fail.

I worked in non-profits too.  They often work off donations or grants etc, which often are never as much as they need, so things are done shoestring, and it's not a business environment so things aren't well run & the often the management might be caring people but not business execs.

A lot of inefficiencies in the public sector, they have no competition, and things often only change if voters make it an election issue, and voters barely know anything that's going day to day, and what they know half the time they don't care much.

Well, now, that is just silly.  Good management is what separates us from the apes and the Soviets.

Don't let Donald Trump hear you saying that is my advice.