VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [142]
“Until one of three things happens. You’re finished – you’ve designed your testing schedule, you’ve rendered your evaluation, whatever is called for.”
“All right.”
“Or you’re blocked – you can’t finish because you need a second opinion or something from somebody else.”
“Or third?”
“You have to stop to do something of a higher priority.”
“Ah, you see! I predict that is going to happen all the time!” Joe protested.
“No, the way we’re setting up the priority codes, it should not happen very often to you or the other analysts,” Sarah assured him.
“What happens when I need to think about something?” he asked.
“Go ahead and think! It’s part of the analyst process!”
“Suppose I need to think about it for a couple of days? A week?”
“Then consider yourself blocked,” said Sarah. “Look, I recognize there is a creative aspect to your job. But you need to focus on one thing as much as possible. Once you have a baton, run that race; don’t wander all over the track trying to run six or seven races at the same time.”
Joe sighed and looked around.
“What about my pile system?” he asked.
“You can keep your pile system,” said Sarah, deciding to fight only one battle a time.
“Molto bene,” said Joe.
The continuing struggles at F&D that spring were metaphorically more like guerilla ambushes and impromptu insurrections than pitched battles. One afternoon a lone analyst – not Joe Tassoni – threw a tantrum when asked about a design that should have been cleared three days prior, and the analyst stormed out. Happily for all, he returned the next morning and signed off on the clearance. That was about as dramatic as it got. But there were all sorts of little resentments and confusions and passive resistance, and these often hidden skirmishes went on through the summer and into the fall.
The most difficult thing, Sarah found, was getting people to subordinate their own needs, their own inclinations, their interests, their convenience, their predispositions, and so on to the needs of the system and the constraint – aka the analysts. Only if they did that would the system yield greater flow and become less chaotic. Even some of the analysts had trouble with this, brilliant though they were.
Most managers, especially the ambitious ones, want to show how good they are, want to show off, and they tend to do this by optimizing performance for whatever is under their own individual responsibility. Viktor Kyzanski was one to try to exploit this natural competitiveness – not the first executive to think of this, certainly not the last – often using billings as the overriding metric to bring it out. He would make it a game, as in which lab could be the most billable? This drove up billings; it also drove away all value-conscious clients. This had once been fine with Viktor; he wanted only the clients with the deepest pockets and the organizational largesse to spend freely. But now Viktor was facing time in the slammer, due to his personal despair over the backfiring of his winning strategy.
Yet Sarah was now faced with the burn-in of Viktor’s culture – as well as plain old human self-centeredness. Through these times, she found herself going head to head with those who didn’t get, or didn’t want to get, the new priorities. Part of the problem was that for the longest while she had trouble stating the priorities succinctly in public; she would bury them in rationality, and by then everyone forgot what she was saying.
At last, after a lunch with Brenda, she came up with some simple watchwords:
“Oakton First. Analysts First.”
That had a certain ring, and sort of caught on. Still, Sarah seemed to be forever going head-to-head – and she was usually a head shorter – with those like the kinetics lab manager who really didn’t like her priorities because they interfered with his schedule. After all, he’d been doing his own schedule for years; why shouldn’t he be the one to determine the order in which tests should be done?
“Your priorities are simply not efficient for my technicians!” he told Sarah.
And if it was not some headstrong go-getter