FASTER YOU FUCKERS - The ILX Work & Productivity Thread

the demand for thoughtful, capable managers greatly outstrips the supply.

day 1 of 2 done for prince2 practitioner and its such wordbollocksy sham

he went on to explain that 'history and industrial revolutions or evolutions' lol were based upon standardising and automating that which could be standardised and automated.

I can just see this man reading some MBA textbook or popular management book that offers this pearl of wisdom and him thinking, 'why, this explains quite a lot!' and then, because he has only room in his head for one explanation, it quickly morphed into 'this explains everything!'

this is excellent news: please report back from the front darragh (keeps autocorrecting to “farrago”).

i keep meaning to revive this thread, sort out the OP formatting, and pull together the various faster u fuckers stuff lying around in my bookmarks.

Is that the Irish version of PMP? Which is the biggest waste of time and money I (er my employer) ever spent. Fucking racket, these certs.

it

as far as i can glean

is something the british govt came up with then privatised

pmp calls for aiui hundreds of logged hours of proj mgmt, this calls for to to remember the interlinking jargonomics of several roles several themes several products and several processes, each of whom ought to have been ambushed on the road to st ives imo

i actually see a bit of value in the dept/service having one understood and defined method its just pointless when i know from experience that it will all be fotd upon first contact with the enem user

It also requires that you pass the most jackassed of all exams, which I say as someone who has taken all manner of jackassed exams in multiple fields.

My current place of work (where I consult, my actual employer fortunately is blessedly free of management consulting shenanigans) is implementing something they refer to as WoW which in their jargon is "way of working" and not what everyone else thinks when they see WoW.

It is like some unholy amalgamation of agile and POP and Tony Robbins, this thing. God only knows what the organization paid PWC or some other hacks for this thing.

i would find it hard not to say it christopher walken style like waaOOOuuw

I mean i find it hard not to say wow like that at the best of times but if you wave that second w in my face you best believe im giving it the two eyebrows

oh oh can we talk about consultancy firms

when im not studying for a regurgitation tomorrow lunchtime like

Oh I'm surrounded by 20 year old PWC babes in the vicinity of my workstation (and they are total babes, totally adorable and lovely) and afaikt they spend their days putting together ppt decks about managing shit when it is clear that they have only ever managed ppt. But it is cute and gross at the same time when they all gather in the VPs office, the VP with the Harvard MBA who has some sort of beardo jeans and puffy vest thing going on. The only shit in his office are a bunch of management books of the kind that make me want to die.

I should be clear the Harvard MBA beardo 40 something dude clearly loves his PWC babes, when they all come in to his office and show him their ppts.

iirc a good designer I worked with in the civil service got themselves put through Prince2 training because it gives you the magic words to put on a PowerPoint so that the Excel functionaries shut up and you can get on with making things.

someone left this lying around on a desk at work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
I didn't realise there was a genre of management novels "written in a fast-paced thriller style".

I wish I was efficient and organized. Since age 13, becoming organized was always my #1 goal and I’ve never come close. Every day is a new adventure of scrambling to fix the stuff I put off the day before. But then somehow it hasn’t hindered my life too much? I don’t understand.

But yeah, the “PWC babes” sound like people I would be in awe of. Even if the powerpoints are nonsense and my way of working is ultimately more efficient, there is nothing I admire more than colleagues at work who have, like, this appearance of having all their stuff together/following through on a plan rather than improvising all day

I feel like i get cut more slack for deadline/efficiency issues than my colleagues because my role is “creative” and I don’t really think it’s fair. Don’t want to share too much about my workplace but, like—too much slack for me, i feel, is part of it

i have been project managed by accenture babes of all types and ive been keeping a shiv in my sock two years now in case any of em ever drop from on high at me again

someone left this lying around on a desk at work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
I didn't realise there was a genre of management novels "written in a fast-paced thriller style".

― woof, Monday, 11 February 2019 23:38 (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my dear dad had some shit goin on in the late nineties and after reading the celestine prophecies he insisted that he could see the energy coming out of kindred souls' eyes for six months guys i know ye think im bad but listen im a fuckin success story given the background rly

i know i tell a story bytimes but i feel it necessary to confirm yes he actually believed this for six actual months, approached ppl in restaurants and shit when he sensed it had happened etc

Ooh i had a friend who used to work for one of those consulting firms. Man, she alwayss seemed so “with it” in college—the exact kinda person who makes me feel like i’m some starry eyed wanderer

It’s interesting to hear about your father’s foray into mysticism deems. Do you think this explains why—among ilxors—you’re on the rational/pragmatic side?

my father was a side-order to my mother treesh thats another thread.

the celestine prophecies is a mgmt/life success as novel is all, so it jogged the thought

Yeah—the mania for efficiency is definitely not disconnected from spiritual impulses—people tryin to reach a higher plane of existence and transcend ordinary human weakness

its a fuckin shortcut to understanding and/or doing the groundwork ime

my trial exam is hitting 15/28 if i had a text id be ok i think

Productivity and performance metrics can bite my fleshy flabby ass. The material my office handles comes in so irregularly that it's fucking frustrating to try to maintain a monthly hours report of 8-hour days, 5 days a week. I want to come up with a passive-aggressive way of saying this in a hypothetical exit interview.

got a two hour audit this morning and i am v underprepared. not sure where else to post this important information.

tho i will note it as a different expression of the old tension between governance and compliance and faster you fuckers productivity.

as silicon valley models of fail fast and constant iteration hit real world compliance - in medical and transport sectors to pick two obvious and salient ones - it’s not going to be pretty.

and probably worth differentiating between faster you fuckers productivity (er “operational efficiencies”) and automation (“operational transformation”). both potentially weaken compliance and quality control.

cant believe i never responded to quincies Deloitte obsvs above

yes!

we get in one of 5 firms to manage our huge projects and its all tv drama gorgeous tv drama behaving 22 year olds with swim lanes and jargon 2.0 and they are awful humans

ive been telling all of my managers we're using agile for the past three years fizzles, it keeps them happy and its as well they dont know what agile is enough to do more than ask because i sure fuckin dont know it enough to bluff if they did

excitingly this did not go... well. turns out our decisions points are not well recorded ('Yes we have that' 'Can show us?' 'How very dare you.'), and we may not be fully aligned with the rest of the company. Got another shot in two weeks' time god help me.

i fully endorse your last two posts tho darragh, they are correct in every particular.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/10/five-hour-workday-shorter-book

There's an article like this in the guardian every few months, my bosses are probably too busy to read them though.

bringing this thread into the covid age:

The co-creator of Scrum says hospitals aren't able to test as many people as a dedicated research and testing institution (that doesn't provide ICU care for any patients) because "[hospitals] are not doing Scrum". pic.twitter.com/T6GzlBL3Td

— John Feminella 🌠 (@jxxf) April 11, 2020

oh and btw absolutely *nailed* the audit second time around (by v rapidly implementing everything they said)

fantastic hour-long documentary on Chinese logistics and delivery firm JD.com, Cao Fei's 11.11.

follows parcel chain from central supply warehouse to deliveries to specific addresses, interviewing couriers and drivers along the way. Quite moving in places – nothing you won't see amongst any workers in highly commodified logistics chains in most societies, but that willingness to drive yourself into the ground for the sake of a family you barely or never see – 16 hour days seven days a week, within a vast, automating system, generates considerable amounts of pathos.

lol

me and quincie have the same discussion on deloitte types all the time

who knew

obv the post bumping thread v much not lol

i was thinking about these logistic chains the other day, yet another example of the true fair cost of a good/service just falling by the wayside

presentation in 3 hours, i should be doing soemthing more useful than watching bake-off repeats and quietly panicking

(although it's not a big deal, just 10 minutes to 20 people)

might go for a walk.

I find that in lockdown workplace emotions become exaggerated. So I become more anxious before even a fairly standard presentation or chairing a meeting, but also the relief afterwards is also much more intense than usual.

Thinking back a year ago when I could race from meeting to meeting and present without really worrying about it feels like a different age.

A short walk is probably a good idea to clear your head and change the environment.

went for a walk, but covid era walks in the park aren't exactly a walk in the park

missing in this thread: Daft Punk content

done.

turned out to be an hour earlier than i thought, which i found out 5 minutes beforehand...

also 64 people, not the 30 i was expecting. but that was just a number at the bottom of a zoom screen and not real people so...

Prob for the best you hadnt all day knowing it so

It can be disconcerting when questions starting pinging on the meeting chat during your talk and people raise their virtual hands to make points. I have found myself saying “I’ll take questions at the end thank you” - otherwise I’d completely lose the thread of what I’m saying.

yeah, an hour's less worrying, less pointless tweaking of script. the small bits i knew were weak i busked.

we had two rehearsals, and the actual thing was a lot smoother. still, cruel and unusual to make us developers do this. we choose the career with machines rather than people for a reason...

we had a "meet the trainees lunch" last week and it was so strange, just 25 people in a meeting introducing themselves and telling jokes, but since everyone was muted and half had the cameras off you couldn't tell if anyone was laughing, the person speaking would just smile and look nervous and say "so...anyway". such a weird an unnatural environment for this sort of thing

in the section after mine we did have someone unmute themselves accidently whilst doing what sounded like voice exercises over dodgy wifi connection.

As someone at the beginning of my history as a medical editor and proofreader, I will honestly say that I fucking HATE Asana and want it to die— the co I'm freelancing for at the moment uses it, and it's just so cramped and fussy, no matter how I change my settings. The last co, which was much larger, used Ziflow, which is just a fuck of a lot easier to utilize and track changes in.

hahahahahah Asana!!!!!! sorry ... Asana was the platform my colleague chose a few years ago to improve info sharing and delegation of tasks and .... he never used it, and they auto-renewed our annual subscription twice before I finally got him to give me the account credentials so I could cancel it.