What fun. Kuro5hin's A Twelve Step Program For Identifying and Eliminating Organizational Change:
No matter what side of the management / engineering fence one is on, there comes a time when one may need to stay right where one is, or to engage in the fine art of stalling. Before the reader passes moral judgment on a word with such pejorative connotation as "stalling," let him stop and reflect on reasons that he might want to stall.
[via An Aggregated Life]
I don't read Kuro5hin regularly, so I don't know how tongue-in-cheek this article is. But it reflects what I've seen discussed around lunch tables when new programs appear. There are many good programs out there, but the cynical amongst us have seen them come and go with relatively little impact on their day-to-day life (or on their paycheck).
I suspect one problem is that even when these programs succeed - meaning that business is better in some way,. people would rather think that the success was possible all along, regardless of "management" efforts. Or maybe management don't make it clear enough that there was an impact. A perfect example was a Critical Chain Project Management implementation we did that shaved 1/3 the time off the last phase of a regulatory filing (12 months instead of 18 months). On the management side of things, we were thrilled. But one of the important actors in the project discounted CCPM and said he knew it was going to happen all along. This is the same guy who expressed high skepticism when we introduced CCPM with the goal of finishing in 12 months.