The Post-Office Enquiry Just Keeps on Giving and A Memory. When Incompetents Collide.

Sadly a couple of weeks ago my Mother passed away. As you do at these times, there was a lot of reminiscing.

One thing that came up was the various jobs I'd done and the tale of the HR manager manager for ICL knocking on my Mum's door asking for me back in the days before everyone had telephones.

My Mum, bless her assumed that he was a friend of mine and kept him on the doorstep while I came downstairs.

Basically he was offering me a job at ICL after I'd done a couple of months as a temp but then been let go.

Could I start next week? You betcha!

Of he walked back to the factory about 200 yards away. Yeah, not everyone had cars back in the early eighties either.

Anyway, ICL eventually got took over by Fujitsu, but one of the policies that crept in while I was there was the parachuting of graduates into senior positions straight from University.

And I wonder if it was a Fujitsu policy that was being adopted, because the singular thing that came out of that policy was the incompetence of those parachuted in place. I had been working as the effective network manager at the factory for a while by then after the previous manager Ralph, phoned in one day and said he wasn't coming back in. Ever. 

Given that the factory was about to go through the very serious rework of the network, going from point-to-point networking to the (then) new fangled open systems like Ethernet, management of the project on a technical and fiscal level was required. So muggins here got stuck in and started the upgrade (completed under budget and in time I'll have you know).

So there I was, hoping my position was going to be made permanent eventually, when along comes a graduate parachuted into the network manager's position above me. It was quite obvious that he wasn't a technical guy. He wasn't even much of a manager either. When he opened his mouth at technical meetings with other factories in the wider network, it was very obvious. The remedy was for the techies to band together and just get the job done.

But it seemed the longer he was in his position, the more he wanted to interfere and meddle in the technical aspects, or the financials, or just basically take over the project to try and take the credit. 

A while later I left, because I could see the writing on the wall: all the good technical people were leaving and it was pretty likely that the manufacturing arm was going to be sold off because it was making a loss due to mismanagement.

I went working for an American firm down South and doubled my salary. The factory I left bled away all it's competent people and eventually the only people left were the managers. Sadly the non-technical staff got shafted when it was sold and then moved abroad. They lost their jobs.

Now I can't say that with more competent management the factory would have stood up to the outside pressures from competition, but I could see a lot of "faffing around" with vanity projects that maybe looked good in technical journals, but cost huge amounts of money and staff resources. Certainly they never saved any money, or improved efficiency. The sort of impractical and expensive stuff that Universities love. One that came to mind was the installation of delivery robots, that were supposed to deliver PCBS and components to assembly workers and then assembled PCBs and chassis' to the final assembly line. 

Robots that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and broke down a lot replaced a very reliable old guy with a trolley that you could have employed for years for the same money. 

I get the same vibe from the Post Office enquiry. The technical guys knew what was what and it seems they tried to avoid making legally binding statements in court and it was left to managers to go up before the judges and make statements that it appears they couldn't back up. Managers that from the current enquiry, were sleepwalking in their jobs. I mean, to not be aware of the implications of the faulty software, or to be complicit in prosecutions when they knew the cause could be the software is borderline criminal let alone incompetent.

It seems that for some reason that the procedures weren't put in place to involve and inform all levels at Fujitsu of the shortcomings of Horizon and no effort was spend resolving the issues. In fact it appears that when the work involved got too substantial and the technical guys said it might impact other areas of the Horizon system, the managers just decided not to implement the changes. 

It seems that possibly that Fujitsu management liaised with the Post Office about the issues, but no-one took the seriousness of them seriously. 

Instead the machine plodded on and put people in prison. 

I assume somewhere people were too afraid to admit they were out of their depth, both at Fujitsu and the Post Office.

A case of when incompetents collide. Management at Fujitsu and the Post Office appear as incompetent as each other and it just may have become a culture of "I won't tell if you don't" as to the incompetence of the various management teams.

<Sigh> something we see across the whole country, across the public and private sector. And even to the civil service and politics.