I’m down at the Large Retailer for three days this week, (supposedly) working on the project. I say supposedly, because working on the project is a little like wading backwards through treacle while wearing snowshoes – bureaucracy doesn’t even come close to describing the process. For starters, it’s an outsourced environment which means that in any given situation there’ll be the agendas of three separate organisations, let alone the usual internal politics. Add to that the impending redundancies, a major reorganisation at board level and a New Very Senior Person about to arrive, and you’ve got a witch’s brew of competing agendas – half the organisation is jockeying for position and trying to shoehorn some high profile achievements into the time left between now and the arrival of the New Very Senior Person; while the other half are keeping their heads down hoping to escape the gaze of the Redundancy Fairy.
So the routine for getting anything done is for the request go up one side of the organisation chart as high as it can get, hop across to the other functional silo and then down that side to the point in the organisation chart that I’d normally deal with by wandering over to the other side of the office and talking to them directly. This would work (almost) if it wasn’t for the fact that the individuals at the top of the organisation where the request hops from one silo to the other spend about 7 hours and 59 minutes of every 8 hour working day in meetings – and not with each other, needless to say.
I’m not sure which is more awe-inspiring – the fact that the organisation has got to the size and scale that it has with this level of internal bureaucracy; or the size and scale that it could be if it was kept under control…
