On The Fly Decision-Making

Ok, the tv show 24 is very cool. Jack Bauer makes all these spur of the moment decisions. Several are unpopular, against the groove type decisions but the thing is that they are all the right decisions. By the last episode of the season, millions of lives are saved and the country is safe.

That type of decision making works for that type of job and environment. It most certainly would not work well in a project based engineering type environment. And yes, as you might have guessed, this is exactly what happens in the O3 environment.

Here's a recent example: Someone in the team located at HQ is resigning soon but as things would be here, the boss does not want to find a replacement for him. The boss thinks that the workers at the factory (located in a 3rd world foreign country that does not use english commonly) should be able to handle the task, since he saw them working for that moment in that one day. Now, the job of supervising the workers there becomes the problem of the team manager whom the boss requests that he go to the factory at least once a week to coach them.

In this scenario, the manager is thus taking over the job of technical designer and will inevitably waste a day every week there superising the workers at the factory. Chances are, only about 1 to 2 hours of meaningful work will be done there each time.

Savings? I suppose a couple thousand a month in not hiring a replacement. Expenditure, at least a thousand in salaried time spent of the manager going over plus transportation costs. I guess this makes monetary sense to the O3 bosses. Kudos to their greatness. Oh by the way, hiring a new tech designer means he can spend 20% of his time on this project and 80% of the rest of his time on other projects. Guess the 80% is worth less than a thousand bucks.