Project Management

Efficiency Fallacy

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“Efficiency” has been in the air a lot in the world of business, technology, and now government. I find this amusing because after 30 years in IT I’m more in the “keep hoping” mode on achieving real efficiency in organizations. Most people don’t think about what efficiency really is, but boy are they ready to try and achieve what they don’t understand.

The illusion is usually somewhere in a Daft Punk-esque dream of “better, faster, cheaper.” We will somehow achieve efficiency that means everything is of higher quality, gets to us faster, and costs less. When you put it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously like marketing and not actually a plan which is what a lot of efficiency efforts turn out to be.

See, sometimes efficiency as people conceive of it is actually not what they want. Yes, sometimes, better, faster, and cheaper is a terrible goal. However a lot of consultants, politicians, and marketers don’t want to admit it, and in many cases are too deliberately ignorant to understand it.

To illustrate this, let me give an example from computer code. Once I was working with a coder that was pulling their ever-thinning hair out over some legacy code that was incredibly brittle – simple modifications created cascading problems. Upon closer examination, the conclusion was a case of people being “efficient” – to stay on time they’d done all sorts of tricks of half-reusing code, ignoring good long-term choices for the easiest-to-code, and left us a mess.

Totally “efficient” and a total disaster to maintain and easy to break.

Something that works may not be the cheapest, or the fastest, or even the best. However it is reliable, consistent, enduring, and keeps going. You can save money, cut corners, overload what you’re doing but it will break. Efficiency is sometimes bad for actually getting good results because when you’re goal is to save time, money, or whatever you don’t ask will it work and keep working.

If you aim for better over some single-number driven measure of efficiency – more stable code, a better process, have higher standards for your company – you will probably get gains in efficiency anyway. Your company database not crashing saves money. Not having lawsuits due to better testing of a product is good. Efficiency sometimes comes from you know, doing things well.

I feel we’ve created a cult of efficiency in America. Maybe it’s also part of our weird health craze trends or a way to cope with economic differences. Perhaps it’s some malignant leftover part of the Protestant Work Ethic. But I think we’ve really overdone it because efficiency may not be what you want – or the only thing.

In closing, let me talk about another traumatizing event in my long career. A project I was assisting with once had employed a contractor who had software that gave answers perfectly. A quick test revealed they’d basically made software that could only past the test.

It was very efficient in its own way, and absolutely totally wrong.

Steven Savage

Pandemic Disjunction

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As my regular readers know, I work in medical technology and IT. It won’t surprise you that I am putting a lot of thought into Bird Flu right now and what kind of responses will be needed. Some of the responses are going to involve me and people like me so I think about it, and by that I sometimes mean panic in a very organized manner.

Now I’m not an infectious disease expert – I’m a Project Manager with a psych degree. I can’t predict the chance of this kind of thing or that or A-3 versus A-6 swaps and so on. I’m more interested how we respond and what I need to worry about to keep things running. I’ll let the medical experts tell me when to worry – well worry, more as I’m also a hypochondriac.

What can I say, I fit my job.

And since I like to talk Project Management, because it relates to my career and to current events, let me share one of my big fears about Bird Flu – what I call The Disjunction. I am very concerned that the response to Bird Flu becoming a pandemic will be a bunch of completely incoherent, disconnected responses which will make it much worse.

We’re a pretty dis-unified country in many ways. I don’t think we can have a unified response to a new pandemic. We have states fighting with and trying to show up each other, and some states basically owned by their political machines. Imagine the response to Bird Flu . . .

One state makes its own vaccines, another finds some loopy lawmaker try to outlaw 5G, one does lockdowns, another bans masks, etc. I’ve seen pretty diverse COVID responses and fluctuations among states now, and considering the amount of B.S. surrounding health these days, I expect if Bird Flu gets to pandemic level, it’ll be worse.

We’re not going to easily get to the truth considering the state of communications. Many news agencies don’t do their job, “both sides things” and of course kiss up to whoever their billionaire owners need to kiss up to. Social Media is awash in conspiracy theories easily monetized, and I don’t even know what’s going on at Meta anymore. We’re not going to have any unified viewpoint or sane, broad method of discussion – there’s no adults in the room.

Social media and quisling news will make it worse.

Speaking of, I don’t expect our “leadership” to handle it. I’ve not exactly been thrilled with the CDC for the last few years anyway. With the promise of RFK and others of his ilk as medical leaders, I’m even more cynical – even if they don’t get in they and their replacements will cause problems. I also expect assorted self-interested politicians and pundits will happily stake out their territories, rile people up with conspiracy theories, and try to take advantage of people. Oh, and I expect lots of people to try to do the right thing but it will be hard.

I think the future response to Bird Flu in the US won’t be a bad response but fifty different state responses, with multitudes of local responses, many of them conflicting. Which might not sound as bad as one unified really bad response, but it’s going to be disconnected and incoherent and that leads to its own problems.

I can see a lot of ways this breaks.

States and cities and so on that take the right measures will still have to deal with the results of others taking bad ones. Having people mask, or get vaccinated, or whatever is great, but when your neighbors are finding new ways to get infected then it reduces your efforts. We share a viral destiny here in this world, and very bad policy can reduce good policy – and that makes for other conflicts.

These disjunctions will generate confusion. Where is it safe to travel? Where do you ship things? How should a hospital respond to emergencies from places of radically different measures of protection? How will people figure out the best response when people are confused, disjointed, and of course deranged or lying?

These disjunctions and confusion will lead to conflicts. States will sue each other, sue the government, cities suing states, personal lawsuits, etc. Do you put in a travel ban on a state awash in Bird Flu? Plus there will be the crazy conspiracy theories, like folks who thought the COVID vaccine made you spread disease.

Some conflicts will doubtlessly get violent. People are primed for it. We’ve seen a lot of disinhibition in this country (which I may comment on more).

As all of this happens, we won’t have accurate numbers. One state will scrupulously measure everything, another won’t report for, I dunno, religious reasons or something. Getting a handle on the pandemic and its impact will be hard. I also expect attempts to cover numbers up by unscrupulous politicians, and you can imagine how that’ll backfire. When your next election comes up, many a politician will want to hide that pile of corpses or the failing hospitals.

Finally all these problems will be exhausting. Remember COVID? Remember that grind? Remember the wearing stupidity? Ready for it again, only with even more to wear you down because now people are primed to discuss how Ivermectin protects you from Chinese bioweapons created by a secret cabal to make you sterile so FInland can seize control? We’re ready to be dumb faster.

So if Bird Flu goes pandemic in the new few years, I don’t just expect an inappropriate federal response, I expect a disjunction among responses all over. It’ll make it harder to manage, ensure more suffering, and scar us pretty badly. Well scar us badly, again.

So me, I’ll be doing doing what I do, keeping things running – find and focus on real goals. Make sure those I work with can do real medicine. I’ll also be ready to stay informed and build my behavior around the idea a lot of people are not coordinated and many are wrong if not malicious. I’ll also be ready to deal with the disjunctions.

A lot of this will be with me buckling the hell down, trying to stay sane. Trying to survive so I can help.

And of course to say “I told you so.” But that part I hate.

I hope I’m wrong.

Steven Savage

Yes, We Need Bureaucrats

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

One thing I hear a lot is “we don’t need bureaucrats.” Now I’ve certainly been frustrated by bureaucracy – what do you think inspired this column – but I also know it’s needed. The problem is not bureaucracy, but it’s how we approach it.

Any complex system – a government, school, play, hospital, etc. is going to have things that need to get done. Orders and record-keeping, tracking and validating, all those everyday things that are important. There are also standards to be followed, and when it comes to say FDA validation or security assessments, you want to get those important – but often boring – things done.

Such things need bureaucracy and bureaucrats. Someone has to pay attention, shuffle the papers, fill out the checkboxes, and triple-check the forms that triple-ensure something isn’t going to kill you. Not everyone can do that – and I say this as someone who is sort of a bureaucrat, a Project Manager.

A bureaucrat provides, however abstract, a moral authority in a complex, boring, and specific situation. As much as you may not want to Do The Paperwork, the paperwork has a point as does the person doing it. Someone is responsible, if kind of abstract from it.

The thing is when we pay attention to bureaucracy, people usually see two things:

First, people see these bureaucratic processes but don’t understand them. Because they don’t understand them they think they’re useless, or pointless, or a burden. Bureaucracy, much like IT setups, often has to be turned off before people notice they need it. In fact, many people’s frustration with bureaucracy comes when it breaks because they didn’t notice it.

Secondly, people don’t think about improving bureaucracy or realize people are trying to make it more effective. Trust me, bureaucrats do ask how to make things run better, but that takes time, needs support, and may not be obvious. Just recently, as of this writing, I found out how one person I knew had completely overhauled an entire validation process, and I hadn’t known even though I worked with them for a year.

We don’t see how much good bureaucracy does or how it improves. When a process fanatic like me misses it, yeah, we all do.

Steven Savage