Spanish trends on quality management: downgrading quality

Sometimes the best work meeting is the one that never took place

I’m back from one of the most surreal work meetings I’ve ever attended, with my boss and a fellow worker, to plan the moving of three branches to a single building. I had my list of topics to be covered at the meeting, including which changes we would have to do at our servers and network configurations (and the changes we would have to raise to our external providers) in order to get everything up and running by the end of the 4-days time frame we’ve been allocated to complete the moving, that is: for all applications and services to be running at normal levels for all users.

But my boss has told me to put it aside and we wouldn’t talk about it at the meeting, because he prefers to deal with other issues of the process of moving (such as connecting users’ computers and relocating an incredibly vintage -but resilient- AS400 server). About those other things on my list… he wouldn’t worry a bit; once the users begin their work at the new building, they would report us what’s wrong and what they miss and what app is crashing or won’t print or won’t connect to the database server, and then we’d get fixing and changing all those configurations we could have made in advance.

That’s a deathly strike for anyone aiming to reach high quality levels at his work, as he’s asked to put aside his will of continuous improvement and work on downgrading the quality level of the IT services instead.

Sadly, I must admit this is not the first time I’m faced with such an awful attitude at other jobs I’ve had, and I wonder if this need to turn down quality for no reason, this need of continuously claim the need to change “something” to improve but, when the chance to effectively do something to improve comes, do nothing, is just an Spanish syndrome or it’s pandemic.

XXth Century Banks

I’m planning my summer holidays these days, and mainly doing it through the Internet, from the flights to the museum tickets, but trouble has come down when booking an appartament for our stay, not really because of the agency (Isabelle has been very nice and collaborative until now), but because of the pains my bank is inflicting me.

I switched my bank account to Caixa Galicia early this year, as it looked like a modern savings bank: no fees for domestic or international transfers or cash withdrawal at any cash point, automatized phone service, and what seemed, at first, a solid online banking system.

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Overcoming organizational inertia step 2: who cares and why

Step 1 was about creating the context for change, getting things ready for a change to occur defining what should be changed and why. Step 2 is about determining who really cares (or should care) about it and why. Read the rest of this entry »

How to overcome the crushing inertia of reality in four steps: step 1

When a customer hires a company like mine to outsource their IT department, they always come with a question or a problem that needs fixing, and rarely asks to help keeping things exactly as they are alleging their organization and processes work perfectly. After all, almost every organization has pain points, and allmost all managers and leaders are trying to improve their organizations. ..

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I love Gartner

Magic Quadrants

I don’t think there is a more important source of information worldwide on IT than Gartner; it brings in-dept analysis and research about almost any aspect regarding technological universe. It’s the place you must go to know in which Hype-Cycle stage the cloud computing thing is, if VDI is the magic potion that will set companies free from the slavery of hyper-expensive and slender productivity of desktop management, to know the maturity lever achieved worldwide on the adoption of ITIL processes, or CobIT, or Six Sigma, or CMMI; in Gartner they discuss the appropriateness of getting an ISO 20000 certificate, who’s the coolest provider on each technological branch, and so on.

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