VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [119]
Poor Bill, Amy thought.
Then she added, “It’s not all bad that he likes his freedom. Gives me lots more time to work.”
Sarah caught the irony and sniggered.
“Well, let’s get back to it,” said Amy.
As she went to round up the others, she discovered Wayne and Murphy in the backyard – and they were talking to each other. Just as she was about to hail them to come back to the table, Wayne cracked a smile at something Murphy had just said. This was a good sign, Amy thought.
The whiteboard on which they had constructed the logic tree of undesirable consequences – the UDE Tree, or “Oodie” Tree, as Amy pronounced it – was set up in the dining room and next to this was a second whiteboard that Amy had brought home from the office.
“Last week,” she said when everyone was seated, “we assembled this … well, this ugly chain of events that digresses from good intentions to dysfunctional results. Today, for however long it takes, we are going do the opposite. We are going to start with the foundation of undesirables and build skyward to create a logical chain of events that takes us from our current reality to a future reality some months from now. In that future reality, we will have turned performance around, become profitable, and good things will be starting to happen again. But before we go any further, I am going to announce some decisions I’ve reached.”
Amy looked from face to face.
“The first of these is that we have to give first priority to turning around Oakton. F&D has overall better profit margins – or used to – but quantitatively, F&D makes a much smaller contribution to the bottom line. Therefore, Oakton comes first. Sarah, I want you to know that this is not a reflection on you or anyone else in Rockville.”
“I understand,” said Sarah. “It’s one set of numbers against another set of numbers. I just hope that our issues are not ignored.”
“F&D will not be ignored, my word on that,” said Amy. “In fact, we will be dealing with at least one of the F&D issues right away – because it seriously affects Oakton. I’m talking of course about the analyst bottleneck with respect to design reviews. That’s my second policy decision. In the past, the analysts have tended to sit on the production design reviews.”
“True, and actually they’ve been incentivized not to deal with them,” Sarah interjected.
“Well, that has to change,” said Amy. “Instead of being low priority, the reviews have to become top priority. Instead of being finished in batches when there’s nothing better to do, they have to be dealt with on a daily basis.”
“I can tell you now,” said Sarah, “that’s not going to be popular with the analysts or probably anyone else at F&D.”
“We’ll explain it to them,” Amy with a bit of edge in her voice.
“Just remember,” Sarah warned, “that the analysts in particular have options, and they are hard to replace.”
“Yes, well, we’ll work on it,” said Amy. “And that brings me to my third and maybe the most important decision. I think we need to unbalance the production line at Oakton.”
She turned to Wayne Reese, who was trying to appear impassive.
“Wayne, can you abide by that?”
“In the interest of achieving quick results,” said Wayne, “I suppose I’ll have to go along.”
“This is not just for the sake of quick results,” said Amy. “I believe this has to be permanent.”
Wayne clammed up, but clearly wanted to speak.
“Go ahead,” Amy said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I know what the dice game shows,” said Wayne. “But you’re not going to base a policy decision on that, are you?”
“Excuse me,” said Murphy, “but I can tell you that while the dice thing might be simplistic, it does accurately depict what goes on in a system with variability and a series of interdependent process steps. In fact, what happened in Round Three was pretty much how I was running Oakton until a just few years ago – before Winner and the WING terminals telling us how to be more productive. Trouble was, we never – I never – made it to Round Four. We kind of allowed inertia to take over. B. Donald Williams tended to be