Conference 7.286::digital

    Re .0
    
    Your note makes a lot of sense. But me your line about no
    extracting/forwarding it took all meaning out of your note.
    DIGITAL.NOTE is a notesfile that is accessible to ALL employees in the
    company. When you post a note here you are explicitly saying that you
    have no problem with all Digital employees reading it.
    Parenthetical question (you prohibit me from extracting your note and
    forwarding it; how about me sending a mail message that says:
    
    	"Gene Haag wrote a really interesting note on metrics in
    DIGITAL.NOTE note 1797.0, you should read it"
    
    Do you prohibit that as well?) If so I ask why I am not allowed to use
    information that you have freely made available to the person I'd send
    my mail message to?
    
    If you don't want to take responsibility for what you write then don't
    post it. I apply a simple rule. If you don't want your note ending up
    in your managers mailbox then don't post it in a notesfile accessible
    by your manager. The fact that some intermediate person may lead your
    manager to a place he could have gone by his own free will is
    immaterial in my opinion.
    
    Dave 

    re. .0
    
    What you're experiencing is a repetition of the old Digital problem:
    who gets the profit ?  If account people are being "leaned on today to
    get their percentages right", they will naturaly try to get the most
    ROI and ROA for their business unit ie. what you're seeing.
    
    What's missing in all this, and you have described it well, is that
    there is no measurement of ROA or ROI for THE COMPANY.  If the company
    profits from a certain activity, then the business unit that furnishes
    the activity but that doesn't directly get the benefit of it SHOULD BE
    REWARDED AND NOT BE PENALIZED.  Digital has to find a way to measure 
    total company gain, and not be limited by measuring only individual gain.
    
    It sounds like "Management Accounting 101", and it's not really
    conceptually more complicated than that but it seems to be beyond
    Digital's comprehension.
    
    David

re: .0, Gene

Once again, the field doesn't sound like a particularly fun place to be.

Years ago, either in here or SOFTWARE_SERVICES, I participated in a discussion
about the relative merits of the field vs. engineering for technical types.

One opinion that I recall from the field was "I like the varied activity in
the field and don't think I could deal with the schedule constraints that
engineers need to live by."

I'll take our schedule constraints anyday in comparison to the silliness
that the field is dealing with as outlined in the basenote.

-Jack

    Dave,
    
    After sleeping on it I guess I really don't care if anyone extracts and
    forwards the base note. There is nothing in that note that I haven't
    discussed with my management on numerous occasions. I'll repost in .5
    without the "no forward" comments. Do with it what you wish.
    
    Our technical people have repeatedly stated that "x" has to change or
    "y" is holding us back. Always, and I mean ALWAYS, the answer is:
    
      "You people are closest to the problems. YOU figure out solutions".
    
    If I hear this one more time I am going to be sick. We have proposed
    solutions and change many times. Those recommendations are mostly
    ignored because they invariably go against some pre-concieved metric,
    process, or policy. I fear many people have just given up. And that is
    real scary for all of us. Many of these people have long standing
    relationships with many customers. The customers trust them. Buy from
    them. You just can't "roll in" somebody to replace them. It sometimes
    takes years (literaly) to gain customers respect. If our senior people
    walk, it will hurt and hurt badly.
    
    These people need leadership, desperately. Instead they are getting
    hounded on a regular basis to comply with ill defined, ever moving,
    sets of numbers. Every now and then I see a memo from the "Z" or some
    other such senior executive that says to forget about the metrics,
    forget about the blule lines, red lines, etc. etc. Just sell, sell,
    sell. 
    
    I wish he could have been in our meeting last Friday. 
    
    Gene.

The sales metrics are killing us. I don't know if other parts of the 
country/world are experiencing the same problems, but in our small
district office, the technical support people, those that directly
support the sales people, are so upset and demoralized I fear we will
lose several of the most valuable ones in the next couple of months.
That could be devastating.

Last Friday all the technical support people were reissued new 
Personal Performance Plans (PPPs). The new PPPs were full of goals,
measurements, and codes none of us have ever seen before. We were 
told to just sign them. Even our manager couldn't explain what all
the codes meant, yet they could have a profound effect on ones career
at DEC. In defense of my manager, she is only the messanger.

I have stated on numerous occasions:

You can't measure technical people using sales metrics. 

And we aren't just moving in that direction. We running full steam towards 
it.

In addition, last Friday we were told that we are not generating "good" 
numbers. That is, the number of hours we are reporting each week does not 
comply with the budgeted plan. Some managers are very upset by this sad fact. 
We, of course, didn't know what the budgeted plan was last Friday and still 
don't today. Yet, if we don't get our numbers "in line" people could lose 
their jobs.

After a lot of discussion, the meeting lasted almost 3 hours, I think I 
have figured out what constitutes "good" numbers. Various technical people
are budgeted and assigned to specific account groups. "Good" numbers for those
people are about 75% of all charged time to their assigned account groups. This
is lunacy in an office like ours where we may have only 1 UNIX expert, 1
network expert, 1 of whatever. That "one" person gets assigned to an account
group but spend 90% of their time supporting all other account groups in 
the office. Lots of "bad" time reported if they put their numbers in 
correctly.

Training over a certain percentage is considered "bad" time. I think the 
percentage is about 5%. Learning, not to be confused with training,
is not as "bad" as training, but not as "good" as time charged directly to
the account group. Admin is the kiss of death. Do not ever even think about
charging more than 2 hours a week to admin. That will not fall within 
the budgeted guidelines. Our managers are getting leaned on heavily about
not managing their "percentages" properly. BTW, we blew our admin numbers
last week because that meeting lasted three hours.

Red line, Blue line, whatever line is causing us so much confusion and
bean counting we are losing site of dealing with the customer and keeping
ourselves technically competant. Sales opportunities are being dropped in 
the bucket. Technical people cannot keep up with the rapid changes in their 
technology specialty let alone have to worry about "proper number generation".

I don't have any problem with measurements in general. But the path we
are currently on is crazy. I intend, at the request of several local managers
(they said to propose what YOU think is fair), to put together a plan that 
fairly evaluates the local technical people's performance and contributions. 
I once had a job of leading 42 technical people (different company, different 
lifetime). I also have very little hope of any of my ideas being accepted. I
have tried, on numerous occasions, before. Most people are just hunkering 
down to try and survive the numbers game. A TOTALLY unproductive, but 
certainly understandable, endeavor. Again, not my style.

The grunts out on the front line are being mauled by the metrics system.
And we are going to pay, and pay dearly, for that sad fact. Someone please
tell me you got it figured out!. I'd love to hear what we can do to make
the "system work for us". I'm fresh out of ideas - not to mention energy.

Gene.

    re .5
    
    If you have draconian goals forced upon you without the opportunity to
    discuss them (surely not within Digital espoused cultural values), 
    
    _and_ 
    
    if you believe that they will affect your employment prospects 
    with Digital,  why not negotiate a salary premium to recognise that 
    increased risk ?
    
    This is sometimes called "commission", which some companies pay on
    individual's results balanced by risk of job loss if those results are
    not achieved.
    
    (But don't hold your breath !)
    
    John
    

    I suggest you post this in GERBIL::US_SALES_SERVICE, as Bob Hughes
    reads that notesfile and does respond in it.  If you hurry you might
    get something mentioned in Bob's DVN on 3/16.

    
    .1
    
    This is a digression from the topic at hand, if the moderator feels 
    this is too far afield, please feel free to delete this.
    
    To put MY OWN interpretation on the motive for this (if I may, Gene)
    request not to extract or forward; it is a matter of trust that has
    apparently been broken.  Is the author of .1 familiar with COPS and
    and Gene's role in it?  Gene has by virtue of his convictions and 
    the courage thereof, placed himself in what might be termed a pre-
    carious position if his superiors were sufficiently distressed.  
    
    These individuals are as .1 pointed out certainly free to roam the 
    notes files to find everything that Gene has written (dir/author=
    and all that).  However, what is the impact on a person's sense of
    trust and (dare I say) honour when he finds out that rather than 
    having someone find out what he has written themselves that that 
    information is extracted and sent by someone else?  
    
    Perhaps the motive for extracting and sending to a third party is 
    purely for the sake of information dissemination and do in the spirit
    of open communication; perhaps not.  Whatever, extracting might destroy
    the context of and therefore the meaning of what Gene might be 
    trying to say; perhaps not.
    
    If this company is to once again enjoy the extraordinary reputation
    it once did, it will do so on the shoulders of people like Gene.
    
    Thank you to all who took the time to read this.
    
    Janis 

    
    Ok, do the logical thing.  When you do your SBS hours, LIE!!
    
    Look, if you think they're gonna give you garbage based on the data
    you submit to them, then give them garbage as data!  
    
    On another note (and I think I'll start one)  did anyone get
    "Selected" to participate in the "Support Time Usage Study" 
    US Sales Support is doing?  Sounds like another way for someone to
    justify their existance by asking me to do the same.
    
    _Ed
    

    
>    That is exactly why Digital is having so much trouble today: trouble
>    understanding our business, our organizations, our ethics, our goals,
>    and our customers.  We can't even tell what the "truth" IS anymore!  At
>    least in the 'official' business channels, we keep telling each other
>    what we THINK the other person needs to hear.

Steve,

Let me see if I can explain something here. For about 8 months we HAVE been
entering in numbers that truely reflect our activities. In otherwords, the
"truth" as best as we undertand it. Entering the "truth" generates "bad"
numbers and percentages. I went so far as to suggest management just tell us
what percentages were acceptable and we would make sure they got "good"
numbers. That, of course, is not what they wanted. However, since the
pre-defined percentages won't change, the accounting won't change, the
system won't change, and "truth" gets everybody into trouble, the only
alternative is to "make the numbers fit the system".

This is what we have been asked to do. Each week (mondays) all the support
people will fill out a paper form that summarizes our hours for the week.
We have been instructed to enter truthful numbers. These forms will be 
delivered to our secretary who in turn will pass them through a
"normalization process". That's the word that was used. We are going to
"normalize" the numbers. Who exactly is going to do this is a mystery.
Just like the percentages, the new codes, and a whole bunch of other
stuff going on I don't even want to know about.

    
What a waste.

About posting .0 in another notesfile for Bob Hughes to see. One voice in
the dark screaming injustice will most likely be viewed as just another
loose cannon to be ignored. If I felt it would really do any good I 
certainly would post it there. Wasn't it Bob or the "Z" who either dreamt
up all this, or are at least tasked with implementing it? You want to tell
them that maybe it's totally out of control? Not me. No thanks.

Gene.
    
    One other thing of note. We were also informed that we were failures.
    Managers at various levels are reviewing these stupid numbers on a
    regular basis. Based on our big discrepency with expected percentages
    we were obviuosly failing at managing the business properly. More than
    one of the support people in that meeting has gone ballistic (read:
    screaming, bloody, mad) because of those statement.

re .9
As a recently departed Software Consultant ( I moved to sales) I saw first hand 
several first and second line managers strongly "suggest" to Individual 
Contributors that they embellish the hours in SBS.  To think that SBS could be 
used for any real reporting purpose is wrong, simply because there is no way to 
extract reasonable data.  The system was so terribly designed, that even an 
honest mistake was almot impossible to correct.  Modifying information could
not be extracted by managers.  Simple things like the comment section were not 
used in the roll up reports.  Since pre-sales projects often had no actual 
project number, a similar number would be used, (same account, wrong project).
This naturally leads to the "simple garbage in Gospel out" syndrome.  You know,
I got this report form SBS and it says that we have been using 3 people to sell 
the hardware upgrade and nobody to sell the Concurrent Engineering project.  The 
CE order is coming along, and it has a real low Cost of Sale!

re .8  I got selected for the Sales Support Time Usage Study, and I left Sales
Support 9 months ago.  I love our level of automation.

Matt

    The pattern here is familiar.
    
    On the front-end, you're skeptical: These numbers are meaningless.
    They answer: Oh no!  Oh, we're really going to use the data we collect
    to methodically evaluate how well we are doing our job and where the
    the strengths and weaknesses are.  Your accurate input is very
    important.
    
    On the back-end, you ask:  How did all these numbers actually get used?
    They answer: Oh! You naive stooge.  Did you really think anyone would
    believe the garbage that was collected in this system?

    re. .8
    
    Thanks for the kind words Janis. We've got a lot of good people in our
    office trying to make a go of it. It just gets harder every day. Some
    have given up. I'm not ready to give up just yet. We'll see.
    
    Gene

    Having been DEEPLY involved in this issue (sales support expense
    reporting), I have found it to be a very interesting problem.
    
    Many of the account managers did not realize that in paying for their
    resources (both sales and support) that they were paying an equivalent
    cost per person that includes overhead items like training, vacation,
    holidays...  As a result many of the managers were suprised to see
    reports that listed n hours of support with apx. n/2 hours of overhead.
    
    They don't see such detailed reports for sales expense so the overhead
    seems to not exist (it's buried).  It's also the case that for the
    first time many of the sales people/managers are seeing the results in
    time for those 'short questions' that take 40 hours work to answer.
    
    I'm sure the planning process will be different next year due to the
    lessons from this one.  (un)Fortunately if the trend continues the
    account managers will have to plan in the same detail for items they
    didn't see this year.
    
    Peter Dillard

    re .11
    
    Went ballistic??  Screamed bloody murder??  I'm the one you are talking
    about, Gene.  I was there and everything you say is true.  Except that
    you exaggerate a little bit on my reaction.  I got mad, but I didn't get 
    screaming bloody murder mad.  Of course, since everyone else worked so
    hard to settle me down I guess I didn't get a chance to get really out
    of control.  But I'm MAD now.  And the more I think about it, the
    madder I get.
    
    Here is my story about Personal Performance Plans (PPPs).  I would like
    to know if my story is typical.
    
    Last summer all of us technical sales support folks in the US were
    supposed to come up with goals for ourselves.  And then we would work
    with our managers to get a set of goals we could all agree on.  Each of
    us and our managers would go thru this process and then both sign off 
    on it when we came up with goals that made sense for everyone and the
    business.  This was called the Personal Performance Plan, PPP.  It
    seemed reasonable at the time.  So I came up with an initial set of
    goals and turned them in to my manaager.
    
    Nothing happened until October 91.  Then I got an emergency phone call
    from my then new manager telling me that the form on which I wrote down
    all the goals was wrong - seems the form had to have little boxes drawn
    around each section.  I couldn't draw the boxes because I was out of
    town and not near a terminal.  
    
    Nothing happened until January 92.  Then the managers had a biiig fire
    drill, where some date set from Texas or New England or someplace had
    to be met for all the forms to be turned in.  I found one of our
    secretaries typing in PPPs, again, from pieces of paper made up by
    the managers.  But the goals on the PPP for me were different than the
    goals I put down for myself in my version of the PPP.  Yes, I went
    ballistic about that one.  And why do secretaries need to type these
    in, again, when there are electronic copies all over the place?
    
    Now, comes March 92, and our next new manager (third since July 91)
    parades yet another version of these PPPs in front of us at our unit
    meeting.  And she tells us we must initial these so they can be entered
    in some system someplace.  I refused.
    
    Our manager talked to me about this today.  She said it's my choice to
    sign or not to sign, but in order to be eligible for DEC 100 and Circle
    of Excellence, I need to sign it.  I told her to send somebody else on
    a political trip to Illinois and/or Hawaii.  I will not sign my name to 
    a document until I understand and agree with what it says.
    
    What kind of system do we have where I am coerced to sign my name to a
    piece of paper with goals assigned to me thru a process I don't
    understand?  And why do the managers use a DEC 100 and COE trip as a
    carrot to entice me to do this?  I don't appreciate one bit being
    jerked around by this insane system.  I am really fed up with this
    mess.
    
    Forward this anywhere you want.
    
    - Greg Scott

    I've been out in the field for almost two years now {EIS}.  Every week I'm
    supposed to submit my hours by various codes to a secretary so that she
    can enter them into SBS.  In two years, I have not received any
    feedback on the hours I enter.   I was told by some to "fudge the
    numbers" or to "make sure you put in all your travel hours".  Who
    cares???  It's obvious that the SBS numbers are meaningless, otherwise
    management would see that we need MORE people out here in the field
    generating revenue {not entering data into a black hole}... 
    
    Over Christmas, I had five people get involved trying to track down 
    exactly what I did for two days and what project number and activity
    code to charge it to... 
    
    The process should be simple for EIS:
    
    	Customer sends a P.O.
    	Consultant delivers work.
    	Customer signs CLAR showing hours worked by consultant.
    	CLAR entered into database {same one as P.O.}
    	Customer is sent bill.
    	Customer pays bill {payment recorded in same database}
    
    
    The SBS system is useless.

    Re. Greg.
    
    I wish it was only you I was talking about when I said "they" went
    ballistic. That would be bad enough. Unfortunately, more people than you 
    are real, REAL, upset by this. More people than you and me. Wish it
    wasn't so. 
    
    Wonder if there is much of a future these days for "horse thiefs"? 
      
    
    Gene.

    Is there something in the water where the noter in .0 is located?  Mr.
    Haag is dead wrong on one matter; the remainder of the note has a
    surreal quality to it, enough so to make me either worry much about the
    aforementioned water or believe that the facts have been severely
    distorted. 
    
>You can't measure technical people using sales metrics. 
    
    Well, Sales Support is part of the Sales organization.  How shall we
    measure them?  Using Manufacturing metrics?  Admin?  Engineering?  I
    think not.  The job of those who work in Sales is to make budget. We
    measure results, not activities.  You can be the most brilliant problem 
    solver in the company, or be capable of delivering the most highly polished
    presentations or demos.  Over the long run, if you cannot figure out
    how to use your skill to help close business, you're a failure.  Many
    technical people cannot accept the indirection inherent in that
    principle; nevertheless, it's the "real world".
    
    As for the rest, I have habitually blown off SBS since day one.  It's
    an upward reporting system (as opposed to a tool to help me do my job),
    so I give it only as much attention as is required to make sure that
    those who profess to care about the feeding of that system (note that
    this pertains only to seeing that it is fed; no one cares what it is
    fed) leave me alone.  I make sure that what goes in accurately reflects
    effort expended across the accounts my group supports.  I do no
    normalization, nor do I face any pressure to do so.
    
    What really slays me is that we are 1 month away from Q4 and the
    account managers, to the best of my knowledge, have YET to receive a
    revenue report they can believe.  Many are STILL trying to get accounts
    they service credited to their set.  Q1 was an unmitigated disaster for
    the company.  Most account groups are still trying to make up for that
    shortfall (hint: you have to SELL stuff).  I cannot believe that there
    is an account manager anywhere who even knows how the sales support
    component of his expense line breaks down, let alone cares.  Given that
    most of the ystems designed to track the important components of a P&L
    just don't work, what's the point?  Why aren't they out there selling
    something??
    
    Now, this is Digital, so anything is possible.  Thank God I work for an
    AGM who has some business sense and provides the kind of leadership
    that keeps us focused on what's important and teaches us to ignore the
    bullshit.
    
    It's late, I'm rambling, so I'll stop with the incoherency.
    
    Al
    
    

    re .7 - the suggestion to post in US_SALES_SERVICE.
    
    I took you up on your suggestion.  I cleaned up my reply from .16 and 
    put it in there.
    
    - Greg
    
          <<< GERBIL::SYSB$:[NOTES$LIBRARY]US_SALES_SERVICE.NOTE;1 >>>
                             -< US_SALES_SERVICE >-
================================================================================
Note 87.0            Dumb ideas and good ideas gone berserk.          No replies
ANGLIN::SCOTTG "Greg Scott, Minneapolis SWS"         84 lines  11-MAR-1992 01:37
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The current system where our technical talent is micro-managed and
    measured with zillions of metrics dictated by somebody from New England
    or Texas or someplace is nuts and it needs to be changed ***now***.  In
    some cases, what started out as a good idea has now become perverted
    beyond all belief.  In other cases, dumb ideas just continue on.
    
    Here is my story about Personal Performance Plans (PPPs) - a good idea
    gone berserk.  I have a hunch my story is typical.  
    
    One of the dumb ideas is SBS, but we will deal with that one later.  
    
    Last summer all of us technical sales support folks in the US were
    supposed to come up with goals for ourselves for FY92.  And then we
    would work with our managers to get a set of goals we could all agree
    on.  Each of us and our managers would go thru this process and then
    sign off on it with our managers when we came up with goals that made
    sense for everyone and the business.  This was called the Personal
    Performance Plan, PPP.  It seemed reasonable at the time.  So I came up
    with an initial set of goals and turned them in to my manager.
    
    Nothing happened until October 91.  Then I got an emergency voicemail
    from my then new manager telling me that the form on which I wrote down
    all the goals was wrong - seems the form had to have little boxes drawn
    around each section.  I was not able to draw the boxes because I was out 
    of town and not near a terminal.  
    
    Nothing happened until January 92.  Then the managers had a biiig fire
    drill, where some date set from Texas or New England or someplace had
    to be met for all the forms to be turned in.  I found one of our
    secretaries typing in PPPs, again, from pieces of paper made up by
    the managers.  But the goals on the PPP for me were different than the
    goals I put down for myself in my version of the PPP.  Some goals were
    added, others were removed.  And the form had a bunch of financial
    goals that nobody was able to explain to me.
    
    And now, March 92, and our next new manager (third since July 91)
    delivered yet another version of these PPPs to all of us at our unit
    meeting last week.  And we were told we must initial these so they can
    be entered in some system someplace.  Note that these are FY92's PPPs. 
    And we are nearly 3/4 thru FY92 now.  I declined to initial mine.
    
    Our manager and I discussed this today.  She said it's my choice to
    sign or not to sign, but in order to be eligible for DEC 100 and Circle
    of Excellence, I need to sign it.  I told her to send somebody else on
    a political trip to Illinois and/or Hawaii.  I will not sign my name to 
    a document until I understand and agree with what it says.
    
    Now my questions, and the part that will probably get me in more trouble:
    
    What kind of system do we have where I am coerced to sign my name to a
    piece of paper with goals assigned to me thru a process I don't
    understand?   What happened to the sensible process laid out last
    summer?  Why is a possible DEC 100 and COE trip used as a carrot to
    entice me to go along with what looks to me like an intimidation
    tactic?  And why am I worried about getting laid off, transitioned,
    right-sized, TFSO'd, for even bringing up this topic?
    
    I feel tired, depressed, discouraged, resentful, paranoid, and
    generally fed up with this system.  The more I think about it, the
    worse I feel.  And since last week, I've alternated betweeen feeling
    mad and feeling tired.  I have not felt this way about Digital in more
    than 10 years with the company.
    
    Don Z and Bob H - if you guys are really in here; you ask me to spend
    my energy on beating HP, IBM, SUN, et al.  And then internal obstacles
    such as these show up and do nothing but depress and demoralize me.
    
    Here is a suggestion for how to improve this system.  Forget COE,
    forget DEC 100, forget the $250 bonus - they are mostly meaningless and
    insulting to me.  Get rid of SBS - just **get rid*** of it!  And throw
    out this year's PPPs.  The gates and metrics to get all the awards are
    meaningless and counterproductive.  Do a DVN where you tear up an SBS
    report and/or a PPP and throw the little pieces of paper on the floor.
    
    If you want to reward people for hard work, offer *all* technical
    people - software and hardware specialists - an annual weekend with
    family at a nice local hotel someplace.  For COE, DEC 100, etc, give
    the local managers a bunch of slots for their technical talent and let 
    them divvy them out as they see fit.
    
    I give my permission to forward this anywhere anybody sees fit as long
    as it stays internal to Digital.
    
    - Greg Scott
    
    

I think that most line managers in sales ARE too busy selling to worry about
this sort of junk.  I also suspect that there's somebody on the Area staff
charged with overseeing sales support.  This "bad numbers" business is the 
something I've seen before from staffies who'd rather diddle with SBS than
get out onto the firing line to see what's really going down.

-dave
(EIS/ ex Sales Support)

	We've learned to live with this sort of insanity
	here at the CSC.

	Every quarter ( or month, or week ) we have a new
	number to hit.  One quarter, the emphasis is on
	number of calls taken directly ( not placed in 
	a callback queue ).  The next quarter, it'll
	be our "utilization" number.   Then, it'll be
	the number of calls we have open and unresolved.

	It's a continuous, moving target, and all goals
	cannot be satisfied simultaneously.

	We've simply learned to play management's game.

	They run around in a panic about "metric y",
	so, we change our reporting so that "metric y"
	looks peachy.  They seem happy for awhile, until
	they notice "metric z".

	Just play their game and don't sweat it.  DEC's
	management development programs select for the types
	of individuals that place value on this stuff, so
	it'll never change....

	Regards, and drink a beer....

	Steve H

>    Is there something in the water where the noter in .0 is located?  Mr.
>    Haag is dead wrong on one matter; the remainder of the note has a
>    surreal quality to it, enough so to make me either worry much about the
>    aforementioned water or believe that the facts have been severely
>    distorted. 
 
I don't care to debate the quality of the water in upstate NY vs. Minnesota.
And I DON'T distort facts and publish them in public notesfiles. Read my
notes again. Read ANGLIN::SCOTTGs notes again. He was there too.

>    Well, Sales Support is part of the Sales organization.  How shall we
>    measure them?  Using Manufacturing metrics?  Admin?  Engineering?  I
 
Read .20. And if you still have to ask the question........

>    As for the rest, I have habitually blown off SBS since day one.  It's
>    an upward reporting system (as opposed to a tool to help me do my job),

So did (past tense) I. Until Friday. It was made VERY VERY clear to us that
the SBS numbers are going to be used to punish (YES I MEAN PUNISH) people
who do not get their numbers in line. People will lose their jobs. I'm not
going to blow that off. You did bring up something that I purposely ignored
in .0. The sales peoples metrics and "money gathering" processes are in 
just as big a mess. And people wonder why we are in such trouble. I don't
envy their processes either. I would just rather ignore them. I've got
enough trouble with my own.

Gene.

    re "fudging SBS numbers"
    
    Yea, right.  Many times, whether I am totally inaccuate or my SBS time
    is a WAG, it doesn't matter if there is no revenue attached to the
    numbers.  I am a "delivery" person, which means if I go out to the
    field to (horrors) do "sales support activities" (in the hopes of being
    able to help generate an opportunity to actually *do* delivery work), I
    am expected to ask for expense relief; ie, travel, transportation
    reimbursement, in addition to an hourly charge for my actual time.
    I wish I had a quarter for every time I heard a field sales person say
    "but this is a *new* opportunity, not on the official 'target' list, so
    I don't hvae budget to provide expense relief", or "travel expense ok,
    but not an hourly charge for your time too".  My response is supposed
    to be "well, have a nice day then".
    
    Jon

    I forgot a couple of details.
    
    Last Friday we were told we would get copies of our new PPPs. It's
    Wend. I'll bet anybody a $100 we'll never see them unless someone or
    somebodies "pushes" the issue. 
    
    Also last Friday's meeting started out with personnel trying to explain
    the "new" Job and Salary Planning Process. After 40 minutes of looking
    at charts, slides with boxes and boxes of numbers, percentages,
    and qualifiers everyone was hopelessly confused. It was decided that a
    seperate meeting was needed to discuss only this topic. 
    
    Another symptom of a bad disease.
    
    Gene.

    
    With all my beefing about what a waste SBS is I must admit that my manager
    is a godsend given what I've heard about PPPs.  He *INSISTED* I keep a copy 
    of the new sheet and pull it out ever so often so I can keep my bearings.
    
    Anyway.  His attitude on SBS is what I consider a practical one.  My
    goalshe excuse me PPP! says I am focused on two accounts that are major
    revenue contributors to our distri oops! account group.  It is therefore
    reasonable to assume I'd "charge" most of my time to these big accounts.
    
    What does not show up is the fact that I also spend a lot of time trying
    to help recruit new customers.  I think the fatal flaw in the SBS logic
    is that it asks us to spend more time treating the well than tending to 
    the sick.
    
    -Ed
    

.22's has the right answer.  Anyone who has worked in the field has seen
the numbers monkeyshines (booking/debooking, cheating on the customer
satisfaction surveys, etc.) 

When you comes to the metrics you have to play the stupid game.  e.g.
Suppose you work a typical 50 hour work week.  You spend 10 hours doing
admin time, 10 hours traveling to customer sites, and 30 hours at
customers. 

When the management says they want to see how much traveling we are doing
you report the time in SBS as:
Admin:  10
Customer XYZ: 30 with 10 Hours travel

When the management says they want travel time cut down you put the
same hours in SBS as:
Admin: 10
Customer XYZ: 40 (Don't break out the travel)

When the management says they want to see high utilization rates then
you enter the same hours as:
Customer XYZ: 40  (Just pretend you didn't work those 10 other hours)

Just let the boys on top see what they want to see.

> 
> 	Regards, and drink a beer....
> 
> 	Steve H
> 

Finally the voice of reason in the wilderness...

Cheers,

JK
 
              --==++    "CARPE DIEM - Sieze the Day!!"    ++==--                

    re:29
    
    Come on ... not all managers feel that way.  Some do, and are only
    looking for verification that they are right.  But others struggle with
    ways to look at quality and the contributions of their employees.  We
    need to get from a quantitative analysis to qualitative.

    Is there any possibility that our eagerness to have "hard number"
    metrics that can be applied to people without further conscious thought
    exists because many managers can't be trusted to deliver accurate, useful,
    timely, and fair qualitative evaluations of people working for them? 
    
    John H.

>> 
>> 	Regards, and drink a beer....
>> 
>> 	Steve H
>> 
>
>Finally the voice of reason in the wilderness...
>
>Cheers,
>
>JK
    
    Tsk. tsk.  Better watch yourselves, beer, wine, and hard alcohol is
    definitely not PC.  :)
    
    --- Gavin

    re: .23
    
    No, no, no, you misunderstand.  I don't doubt for a minute that what
    you reported as happening, happened.  What MUST be a severe distortion
    is the entire reaction to whatever stimulus prompted the whole scene.
    Forget for a moment the questionable integrity involved in cooking SBS 
    numbers (which has the effect of screwing those who underspent their
    budgets and rewarding those who overspent).  What demon unleashed from
    the very bowels of DEC hell could cause management to behave that way?
    It must be the water...
    
    And I've read and reread .20.  I see only a suggestion that we throw
    out this years numbers but no suggestion of what to replace them with. 
    Sorry, but that dog don't hunt.  Forget all about NMS / AMS / red-line /
    blue-line / revenue /allowances / P&L / CUPs / BUPs / funding / selling
    / ad nauseum.  EVERY account, set and group had a CERTs budget, just
    like every other year.  EVERY sales rep had a CERTs budget just like
    every other year.  Presumably, every sales support rep supported an
    account, set, group, rep or some combination thereof this year.  It
    should be plainly obvious what their target should be and what their
    current measurement is.  Redeployments will affect a small percentage,
    but it should be crystal clear for the vast majority.
    
    So, if not business closed, what should we measure sales support on??
    
    Al
    

    re .33
    
>    So, if not business closed, what should we measure sales support on??
    
    Funny you should ask.  My manager and I had a long discussion about
    this very topic today.
    
    Business closed is a fine way to measure sales support.  I think I
    could live with that.  Measure me on the results of what I do, not how
    much time I spend doing it.  This is exactly what I want.
    
    I would also like to see professional peer reviews for technical
    people, where peers review eachother's work.
    
    I put in a set of goals for myself last summer.  If the system had
    worked as it was supposed to work, a manager and I would have
    negotiated these goals and come up with something reasonable.  But the
    system didn't work.  It evolved into something, as you said, right out
    of DEC Hell.
    
    The system didn't work and so I proposed getting rid of it.  It does
    more harm than good.  btw, My manager and I had a long and productive 
    talk about this one today also.
    
    - Greg

    I am not in Sales and I don't play a salesperson on TV but it seems to me
    that CERTS is a completely outdated metric.  In the dark ages at DEC
    when we were a backlog-driven company, CERTS were much more meaningful
    as a present measure of future business.  Now that we have virtually no
    backlog, why aren't we changing to a revenue metric-based? 
    
    First of all revenue is hard dollars and second of all it also rolls in
    aspects of customer satisfaction (we don't get paid if we don't deliver
    what we promised).                  

>      <<< Note 1797.36 by AGENT::LYKENS "Manage business, Lead people" >>>
>                             -< How about profit? >-
>How about PROFIT  as a metric to measure everyone involved in a sale? The CERTS

	What a guy !  What a concept !

	Seems like seeing Sales Support folks as anything but a 
	service or resource paid for out of 
	Profits From Sales to Actual Paying Customers
	leads us down the primrose path.

	If a sale legitimately requires 80 hours of Sales Support 
	involvement, and our price doesn't include enough to cover
	hardware, the support, and all the other costs, then
	THIS IS A LOSS, eh ?

	We should not sell at this price !

	Perhaps this is too simple.  Perhaps there are still folks
	in upper management that don't understand that you're
	not making money if you're spending more on the sale than
	you're taking in.....

	Steve H

    I just want to thank the individual(s) who feels it is necessary (for
    whatever reasons) to forward notes out of this topic and/or cross
    posted notes to my managers A1 INBOX. It saves my manager the trouble
    of having to learn how to use VAXnotes which, BTW, she hasn't the time
    to do anyway.
    
    I certainly hope you are reaping every reward you aspire to by such
    actions. I will refrain from the name calling I was sorely tempted to
    do.
    
    Gene.
    

RE: -1

Ahhh the Cheap-shots, Sneaky and Back-stabber, are at it again eh?  They have 
relatives everywhere.  I have found them to be a gutless and, generally, inept 
bunch.

Peter

    RE: .35
    
    >> Now that we have virtually no backlog, why aren't we changing to a
    >> revenue metric-based?
    
    I thought that under NMS we *are* doing this. 
                                    

          <<< GERBIL::SYSB$:[NOTES$LIBRARY]US_SALES_SERVICE.NOTE;1 >>>
                             -< US_SALES_SERVICE >-
================================================================================
Note 87.4            Dumb ideas and good ideas gone berserk.              4 of 4
ANGLIN::SCOTTG "Greg Scott, Minneapolis SWS"         17 lines  13-MAR-1992 01:33
                                -< A follow-up >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I understand this note has had some visibility in the upper ranks of 
    New England.  I also understand that some people in Texas had a few
    phone conversations about these issues.
    
    I told my manager I would post the status in here to follow up from .0. 
    My manager and I had a long talk about PPPs and other issues today.  We
    went over my PPP, line by line, and talked about the whole thing.  We
    came to an understanding on this issue I can live with.  My PPP needs a
    couple minor changes, and then I'll sign the dad-blamed thing.  
    
    re: My suggestions in .0 for how to make life better in the field.  I
    understand these suggestions touched some sensitive nerves back east.
    All I can say on that is, the current system is making lots of peoples' 
    nerves out here at the bottom of the chain of command sensitive, too.  
    And these issues touch our nerves plenty hard.  
    
    - Greg Scott
    

    1- Dont forget the nuclear physics known as "principle of dubiousness of
       Heisenberg". Metrics change what you look. 
    2- We never have question about metrics on manager ;-) 
    
    my 2c worth...
       					YaCo

    A possible solution to the "Truth in Metrics" problem discussed here
    would be a modern version of a system we used in IBM way back in the
    Dark Ages (mid-60's).
    
    Every minute of our time throughout the working day was recorded on
    what was called an "Incident Report", a Hollerith Card.  Work was
    appropriately categorized and reported, and at the end of each working
    day (TOTALLY without any management involvement) each one of us dropped
    the card in any US Mail Box.  They went to a central facility in Kansas
    City.
    
    Then, once a month we would get a complete wrap-up report on our
    activities throughout the previous month.  Our managers would get the
    same report, plus I'm sure some additional management-type info.
    
    Now, why couldn't the U.S. field have some sort of a central, modern,
    version of what I described above?  Of course.............it would be
    necessary to know how to use computers.....hmmmmmm......maybe we had
    just better forget it.

RE:.44

Dick, what you have described is what they are doing with SBS.  All
of the info goes to a central location and reports are generated from
there.  The problem, as I hear it, is that some manager (s) don't
like the numbers that come out of the reports so the input is modified
to keep the complainer(s) happy.

As I have said on a number of occasions, reports can not make up for
MBWA (Management by walking around).  A manager either knows what
the folks are doing or they don't.  If they don't, there is no report
that will fix the problem.

Lee G.

    Gee, the only problem is that the input is modified to match some
    expected result.
    
    My... that's such a small problem.
    
    There's top-down arrogance regarding the paradigm of management
    reporting that IBM is trying to do something about, and DEC accepts as
    business-as-usual.
    
    Honest input should be used as a diagnostic tool for the managers to
    examine their own policies and practices, not as a club to hit on the
    top of people doing direct customer contact work and get them "back in
    line".
    
    The higher you get in Digital, the more you observe that there's not a
    single number used as projection, market share, profitability, etc.
    that isn't chosen to serve someone's career management objectives.

	Yes, SBS is supposed to be capturing the time for the Sales Support
	folks.  However, it does not address the time for Sales.  That might
	generate some really interesting numbers.  If you really want to find
	the cost of selling, you have to roll up everybody's numbers.  There
	is absolutely no way for that to be done within Digital today, that
	I am aware of.  The only people that I know report their time to
	customers are Software Services, Field Service (I know their name
	has changed), and Sales Support.  But this is a whole other bag of ...

	I kinda like the cert/install budget.  That really gives incentive
	to the sales person to have a successful install.  With account reps
	changing every 6 months to 1 year, it might do something to improve
	customer satisfaction.

tgc

Why don't we scrap all metrics that don't result in a measurable customer
benefit?
								- Ian W.

ps:	"Many people use numbers in the same way a drunk uses a lamppost;
	 for support rather than for illumination".

    
    Gene,
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Obviously, the caveat in your base note was sadly necessary.  Sorry .1
    but it seems that both you and Candide were wrong in this (supposedly)
    best of all possible worlds!  (past tense, perhaps)
    
    From having followed COPS and this file and having the guts to do 
    what I don't have the guts to do, I feel I must offer you an apology
    from all those who respect you and your efforts, regardless of our
    degree of agreement or disagreement.
    
    ...also my .02 worth....
    
    
    Janis
    

    What, pray tell, is COPS???

    Thanks again for the kind comments. I'm not done yet.
    
    Re; What's COPS?
    
        If you really want to know I'll send you a 15 page post mortem.
        Send me mail if your interested.
    
    I have been contacted by people in DELTA about using my base note (or 
    more appropriately .5) in discussions with senior management. I am going
    to clean up .5, add some recommendations, and send it to DELTA this
    afternoon. I will post it and subsequent updates in here as I get them.
    If node HAAG suddenly disappears from Digitaland you'll know that maybe
    that wasn't such a good idea. 
    
    Gene

    Now wait a minute!
    
    I've done my share of bitching in here and other notes files.  Look at
    GERBIL::US_SALES_SUPPORT 87.* and my replies in this string for the most
    recent examples.  I've hammered the upper management more than my share
    of times over the years.
    
    But come on, what evidence exists about some mysterious "they" who
    are enforcing political correctness in notes?  If the Delta folks want
    to use Gene's note and take up the issue with upper management, and
    Gene gives his OK, then that is ***good*** not bad.  Maybe we can do
    something constructive about the issues discussed in here.
    
    I just don't buy the theory that anyone is trying some sort of
    coercion.  If you have evidence to the contrary, present it in here so
    it can be evaluated.
    
    There is enough garbage going on right now without us making up
    additional garbage.  
    
    - Greg

Jim

Thank you for your interest in my concern about our metric systems.
Per our discussion, I have attached my original note. Please feel free 
to discuss it with anyone who may wish to review the situation.

In the last 2 days I have been contacted by many field people about these
issues and they unanimously agree. The system is hopelessly flawed. Some
suggestions based on those talks:

   1. Just shut the SBS system down. Entirely. Completely. Now.

   2. Return the PPPs back to their original format and intent of last
      summer. Many individuals have had to write 4 and even 5 PPPs since
      last July. 

   3. Channel some of the enromous amount of time, energy, and money being
      spent on SBS into developing a new, meaningful, and simple time 
      reporting system. Implement the new system concurrent with FY93. FY92
      time reporting mechanisms should be considered a lost cause.
      
   4. A good place to start might be with sales support time usage survey 
      recently sent out to groups of field people, myself included. At least
      this survey has fairly accurate categories that define what it is we
      do on a day to day basis.

Getting started on these things will have an enormously positive impact on 
field morale. And, from my perspective, that's the first thing we need to 
accomplish to get this company rolling again. 

Please feel free to contact me at anytime.

Rgds,

Gene Haag, Network Consultant
Minneapolis, Minnesota.

****************************Original Note Follows***********************
The sales metrics are killing us. I don't know if other parts of the 
country/world are experiencing the same problems, but in our small
district office, the technical support people, those that directly
support the sales people, are so upset and demoralized I fear we will
lose several of the most valuable ones in the next couple of months.
That could be devastating.

Last Friday all the technical support people were reissued new 
Personal Performance Plans (PPPs). The new PPPs were full of goals,
measurements, and codes none of us have ever seen before. We were 
told to just sign them. Even our manager couldn't explain what all
the codes meant, yet they could have a profound effect on ones career
at DEC. In defense of my manager, she is only the messanger.

I have stated on numerous occasions:

You can't measure technical people using sales metrics. 

And we aren't just moving in that direction. We running full steam towards 
it.

In addition, last Friday we were told that we are not generating "good" 
numbers. That is, the number of hours we are reporting each week does not 
comply with the budgeted plan. Some managers are very upset by this sad fact. 
We, of course, didn't know what the budgeted plan was last Friday and still 
don't today. Yet, if we don't get our numbers "in line" people could lose 
their jobs.

After a lot of discussion, the meeting lasted almost 3 hours, I think I 
have figured out what constitutes "good" numbers. Various technical people
are budgeted and assigned to specific account groups. "Good" numbers for those
people are about 75% of all charged time to their assigned account groups. This
is lunacy in an office like ours where we may have only 1 UNIX expert, 1
network expert, 1 of whatever. That "one" person gets assigned to an account
group but spend 90% of their time supporting all other account groups in 
the office. Lots of "bad" time reported if they put their numbers in 
correctly.

Training over a certain percentage is considered "bad" time. I think the 
percentage is about 5%. Learning, not to be confused with training,
is not as "bad" as training, but not as "good" as time charged directly to
the account group. Admin is the kiss of death. Do not ever even think about
charging more than 2 hours a week to admin. That will not fall within 
the budgeted guidelines. Our managers are getting leaned on heavily about
not managing their "percentages" properly. BTW, we blew our admin numbers
last week because that meeting lasted three hours.

Red line, Blue line, whatever line is causing us so much confusion and
bean counting we are losing site of dealing with the customer and keeping
ourselves technically competant. Sales opportunities are being dropped in 
the bucket. Technical people cannot keep up with the rapid changes in their 
technology specialty let alone have to worry about "proper number generation".

I don't have any problem with measurements in general. But the path we
are currently on is crazy. I intend, at the request of several local managers
(they said to propose what YOU think is fair), to put together a plan that 
fairly evaluates the local technical people's performance and contributions. 
I once had a job of leading 42 technical people (different company, different 
lifetime). I also have very little hope of any of my ideas being accepted. I
have tried, on numerous occasions, before. Most people are just hunkering 
down to try and survive the numbers game. A TOTALLY unproductive, but 
certainly understandable, endeavor. Again, not my style.

The grunts out on the front line are being mauled by the metrics system.
And we are going to pay, and pay dearly, for that sad fact. Someone please
tell me you got it figured out!. I'd love to hear what we can do to make
the "system work for us". I'm fresh out of ideas - not to mention energy.

Gene.

    Somebody suggested in here that if you're going to bitch about the
    system, come up with a way to make it better.  That suggestion makes
    alot of sense.  So here's how to make it better.
    
    - Greg
    
          <<< GERBIL::SYSB$:[NOTES$LIBRARY]US_SALES_SERVICE.NOTE;1 >>>
                             -< US_SALES_SERVICE >-
================================================================================
Note 87.6            Dumb ideas and good ideas gone berserk.             6 of 11
ANGLIN::SCOTTG "Greg Scott, Minneapolis SWS"         56 lines  13-MAR-1992 11:58
                         -< Some concrete suggestions >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I griped about the system in .0 and offered some suggestions.  Here is
    an attempt to add some concrete ideas to my suggestions to fix the system.
    
    First, I propose we remove the word, "resource" from the Digital
    vocabulary.  All of us, top to bottom, are people, and we should refer
    to ourselves that way.
    
    Here is how the system should work for technical support people in the
    field:
    
    Every year, account managers decide how much of what kind of support
    they think they will need for the following year.  This gives everyone
    a picture and forecast of the business needs and skill sets required.
    
    Next, unit managers and technical people should go thru the PPP process
    as it was laid out summer 1991.  Come up with a bunch of  goals for the
    year and sign off on those goals.  These should be results oriented
    goals, not "time-spent" oriented goals.  Since the process involves
    everyone with a stake in the outcome, the resulting sets of goals
    should make business sense as well as personal sense for everyone.  At
    minimum, the goals should represent a compromise between personal and
    business needs.
    
    Periodically, technical support people and their managers should check
    progress against the goals laid out.  And technical support people
    should be measured on how well they progress against these goals.
    
    How do you charge back account managers for the people they use? 
    How do you make them accountable?  The current system depends on an
    elaborate time reporting mechanism that does not work and that nobody 
    understands.  Get rid of it.  
    
    Instead, I propose using the PPP goals as a natural enforcement
    mechanism.  If support people and their managers have an agreed-upon
    plan in place, based on the forecasts from account managers, then the
    system should tend to work correctly.  The accountability mechanism
    becomes progress against the plan, not time billed to an account
    manager.  For P and L purposes, just charge the account managers a
    fixed price at the beginning of the year and get it over with.
    
    This idea has lots of benefits.  First, it removes the incentive
    throughout the organization to "interpret" the time reporting numbers
    and make questionable business decisions.  It removes an unnecessary
    layer of  complexity from our day to day lives.  It removes an
    instrument of fear and paranoia from the field.  And it saves money by
    removing the massive infrastructure required to feed it.
    
    This proposal also has intangible but equally important benefits.  The
    proposed system treats our technical talent more like professionals by
    trusting people day to day to do what makes sense.  Since the
    enforcement mechanism is progress against goals, rather than accounting
    for a 40 hour work week, people should begin to feel better and more
    positive about theier workplace.  This can only result in increased
    productivity.
    
    - Greg Scott
    

    I don't know what a slam against moderators is doing in a note on
    metrics, but if you want to pursue this here, what conferences are you
    talking about where PC is enforced?

    re: .34
    
    I'm a little confused.  It sounds like your PPP's have, as metrics,
    SBS-type numbers.  In other words, you get measured on how much time
    you spend doing this or that for various accounts.  Is this correct?
    
    Assuming it is, it makes no sense!  What possible indication of skill or
    success is derived from such a measurement?  The most incompetent boob
    can figure out how to divide their time according to a formula!
    
    The PPP's came with a very specific advice package.  To net it out,
    individual contributors were supposed to be goaled on CERT's or units
    sold (i.e. market penetration).  Nothing was mentioned about time spent
    here or there.
    
    CERT's still has some relevance at the sales rep level since they have
    the primary responsibility of closing business.  It's a very
    meaningful and clear number - bring the P.O. in, get the credit, move
    onto the next opportunity (make sure the order doesn't debook!). 
    Revenue, margin $ and margin % are more meaningful for account
    managers, who are charged with running a business.
    
    I'd actually like to see a 'sanitized' copy of the renegade PPP in
    order to judge for myself what's going on here.
    
    Al
    

    re .58
    
>    I'm a little confused.  It sounds like your PPP's have, as metrics,
>    SBS-type numbers.  In other words, you get measured on how much time
>    you spend doing this or that for various accounts.  Is this correct?
    
    Yes - that was exactly my problem.  I think we've since fixed that
    problem.  This was part of the long talk my manager and I had the other
    day.
    
>    I'd actually like to see a 'sanitized' copy of the renegade PPP in
>    order to judge for myself what's going on here.
    
    Heck, I would put an unsanitized copy in here if I had one!  That was
    my other problem - we were all asked to initial the dad-blamed things. 
    Then they were collected back up to feed some system someplace.  Except
    I decided not to initial mine.  Nobody where I live has a copy of their 
    PPP.  I don't know whether the system as it exists today allows us to
    have a copy of the "official" plan.
    
    Anyway, since you asked about specifics on my personal situation, here
    they are.
    
    You already know why I refused to initial my PPP.  In a nutshell, the
    PPP that "the system" produced was different than the one I turned in
    last summer.  And it changed thru some process I don't understand.
     
    When my manager and I went over my PPP line by line, we found a little
    box in the upper left corner of page 1.  It had an industry code and a
    percentage.  It says I will spend 90 percent of my time in one
    industry, 10 percent of my time in another industry.  We looked up what
    the codes meant and I think the industries were medical and education. 
    I objected to that (still do) because I have technical skills that
    should be available to all industries we call on.  In English, I know
    lots about our products, very little about any particular industry.  It
    just doesn't make sense to have a plan that says I will spend a given
    percentage of my time in any industry.  The system can put anything
    they want in there but it can't make agree to it - simple as that.
    
    There were also a couple qualitative goals on the back page that don't 
    make any sense.  I think those will disappear in the next rev also,
    although this is not a big deal to me.
    
    So, the deal we came up with was, get rid of the percentages and I'll
    sign the plan.  At first, we were going to just white it out, but we
    both agreed that the official plan is still in some electronic system
    someplace.  So the final agreement was, print up another plan with the
    percentages and industry codes blank - evidence that the electronic
    version is right - and then I'll sign it.
    
    - Greg

    re: .59
    
    Either you or your manager are making much ado about nothing.  On my
    peoples PPP's, I either left those spaces blank or used them only to
    indicate a deployment plan.  For instance, some of my people support
    multiple industries or account sets.  The numbers, if any (I don't have
    them in front of me and I can't recall what's there), that I put there
    probably reflected the expected funding from each source.  It certainly
    wasn't my intention to hold rigidly to them - they're only a plan. 
    People's real activities would be dependent upon the forecast -
    hopefully the "best" business would take priority.  In any event, we'd
    try to do the right thing for Digital and in no instance would it even
    occur to me to use them as a metric.
    
    In other words, anything above the quantitative/qualititative goals
    sections is just 'stuff'.  Not meant to be a goal.  Like your name.
    Useful for identification, but we won't keep you from changing it
    during the course of the year!
    
    Al
    

    Al,
    
    I don't think Greg, myself, or my manager are making much ado about
    nothing. My manager made it very clear a week ago yesterday that we
    were discussing PPPs and percentages because her manager (my manager's 
    manager) got a lot of flak (I am being polite) from his manager (my 
    managers managers manager) about bad percentages. My manager is clearly
    worried about all that number stuff. So am I.
    
    It wouldn't surprise me at the least if PPPs, SBS or whatever are handled
    entirely differant in your part of the world. God only knows it
    wouldn't be the first time this company tried to implement a corporate
    directive in about a gadgillion different ways. Only difference now is
    it will cost people their jobs with the company. Much more serious than
    a screwed up system in - say - 1986.
    
    I too would love to see a copy of the new PPPs we were presented with
    8 days ago. On Monday I will go search for an electronic copy of one
    (mine). Even though I asked for a copy of one 8 days ago - nothing has
    materialized to date - electronic or paper. That's my career we are
    talking about. If I get a copy of it I just might post it here. It would
    be interesting to get comments from other areas of the country to see
    just how much consistancy there are in PPPs. My guess is they are grossly 
    different dependant on geography.
    
    Another symptom of a sick system. 
    
    Gene.
    
    

    "Bad percentages" have been mentioned a number of times.  Could someone
    define or give examples of 'bad' vs 'good' percentages?
    
    Peter Dillard

    Peter,
    
    Nobody will tell us exactly what consistutes "good" vs "bad" numbers.
    That's part of the problem. It's a big secret. Yet is does exist.
    Absolutely no doubt about that. My notes from our meeting tell me the
    following numbers are pretty accurate and will be acceptable ones -
    though they don't come even close to reality.
    
    Every week report 40 hours along the following percentages. Remember,
    more than 40 hours screws up the system and percentages. Like the last 
    training session I attended where I reported 12 hours of travel and
    about 60 hours of training - all in one week. The numbers are very
    accurate, blow the expected percentages all to hell. He is my
    understanding of what constitutes "good" numbers for a weekly report.
    
               32 hours - supporting customer activities in the accounts
                          you are assigned to. It is less than desirable
                          to report hours to accounts you are not assigned
                          to.
    
                6 hours - training, learning, etc. Trying to learn a new
                          application to do a customer demo can blow this
                          number REAL fast.
    
                2 hours - Admin. Meetings, travel, system maintanance (like
                          installing new S/W on my workstation or doing
                          backups). Basically anything that cannot be 
                          directly "charged" to a specific customer.
    
    I believe these numbers/percentages are what the "system" is looking
    for. I can see whole legions of folks right now working diligently to
    "push" that 32 hour number higher and higher because they will get some
    reward for it. If we can prove we are more and more customer focused
    then we will sell more product. Right? Yeah right. 
    
    No. The system is horribly out of control. I say (and so do a lot of
    others) shut it down. And shut it down now.
    
    Gene.

	I find the 2 hours of admin time really interesting.  Digital
	provides all employees with 1/2 hour of break time each day.  This
	adds up to 2.5 hours.  This is before having to sort through about
	20 mail messages each day that are read and deleted; and which are
	not at all account related.  Say that each message is processed in
	an average of 30 seconds.  That is another 1 hour per week.  We are
	now at 3.5 hours.  Openning paper mail, going to the rest room, and
	all those other little things that occur in a week, and I would
	guess that all adds up to another hour.  4.5 hours per week seems
	like a good starting point for admin time.

tgc

	Stepping back from the fray a bit...

	I believe that it is the intermittent nature of
	sales support folks' contributions that makes this
	accounting so difficult.

	If nothing "serious" is on the burner, then, naturally,
	sales support folks may not have a great deal to do.

	But when Mega-Corp starts discussing international
	networks, 5000 workstations, etc., etc., then the
	sales support folks are working 14 hours/day.

	So, the problem for accountants becomes:

	How does one justify keeping sales support folks on the
	payroll during the slow period ?

	Doing it on an office-by-office basis results in the
	silliness described in this note.   Maybe these folks
	need to be available nationwide or worldwide, and sent
	to assist with sales WHEREVER THE MONEY IS COMING IN.

	Their salary and other costs would be borne by the sales
	organization that employed them FOR EACH JOB.

	If the costs are too high to fly a sales support rep in for
	a two or three week selling period, then that office
	should hire someone.

	The point is, these individuals provide real value in a selling
	situation, and Digital should pay for them AS A COST OF SALES,
	per job.

	I don't know how else it can, work, given the incredible
	"spreadsheet mentality" exhibited by the folks who are 
	running this show....

	Steve h

    Steve,
    
It sort of, kind of, works like that today in a convulated way. There are pools
of support people scattered around country that are available to account 
groups for "free". That is, these groups do not enter time into SBS that can
be charged back to the account manager who has asked for their services. Talk
about stupidity. The metrics system now "forces" people to be even more
inneficient and ever more wasteful of company money's. Consider the following
example. It occurs a lot. AND I MEAN A LOT. I see examples of this every  
week.

Sales rep A in Minneapolis needs a PC support person to talk to a customer
and qualify some business. The sales rep knows it's going to take 2-3 days
of some support persons time to get the business qualified. So the sales
rep, quite appropriately, asks him/herself: "Whats the most cost effective
way to utilize support resources for this opportunity"? The answer is 
obvious. The PC support person in Dallas is "free" the way the current
metrics work. Yet the PC support person accross the hallway will charge
my account group 16-24 hours of support in SBS to qualify this opportunity.
So we fly people up from Dallas to do what someone in the next cube can
do. I kid you not. This happens a lot.

This is a multi-lose situation.

 1. The Corporataion loses because significant additional cost is incurred
    for this particular opportunity.

 2. The customer loses because they have no chance to develop a relationship
    with local technical people. Ultimately the sales rep loses because of
    this - but probably not this month or quarter.

 3. The local PC support person loses big time. His/her knowledge of what
    is happening in the account goes away unless there is an immediate
    crisis. He/she slowly, but surely, begins to charge more and more
    time to "other" accounts or undesireable categories like training or
    learning. During the sales budgeting process (occuring right now for
    FY93) the account teams come to the realization that they really don't
    need a local PC Support person. They fail to budget for one in FY93 
    and someone, someone that we REALLY need, gets layed off in July.
    I've seen this happen before and it will happen again.

The system is sick. We need to admit that perhaps we didn't implement this
very well and shut it down. I know that's asking a lot because some peoples
pride gets in the way. Not to mention political, technical, etc. issues.
However, God help us if we continue on the present course.

Here's a good example. I just got a phone call. Not five minutes ago an OEM
from PA called me. Seems they are going to sell a VAX 6000 to a local (MN)
company. The account manager is in Dallas and has not returned the OEMs 
calls for at least 10 days. The OEM got my number from a different OEM who
was in some presentation I did 3 years ago.

The customer needs to submit a paper to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
on how the network will be configured to ensure fault tolerance. Multiple
paths, etc. I know this customer well. I have spent years calling on them.
I know we can fix them up with a couple of days of work. Problem is they
are not funded out of any local account groups. No groups that funded me will
get any revenue from this customer. That's my dilema.

The way the system and metrics are tabulated I should tell this OEM to go
push on Dallas some more. The OEM says we need someone to respond now. We've
delay to long already and the sale is in jeopardy. Where do I charge the 
time and save my butt. The Dallas sales person probably won't even see a
couple of more day's of support charged to his account. If he does, he 
will wonder where these mysterious numbers came from. I get penalized
for spending time on accounts outside my account group.

I'll go and try to save this sale. Then I'll try to figure out what to do with
the numbers game so I don't get layed off in July. The sales rep in Dallas?
He did exactly what he is being rewarded to do. He got the system sold and
didn't have to spend nearly a dime on support people. The OEM did all the
work. Just like we want it to be.

I've go to go. There are sales to be had out there. For someone.

The system is sick. And we will pay big time until somebody does something
about it.

Gene.

    
    
    	Deja Vu....
    
    	Sounds like a note stream entered last summer by Jerry Beeler (?)
    	out of a sales office in Calif.
    
    	I guess the customer was across the street from the DEC office but
    	they were forced to go through someone in Dallas or Houston. 

    
    Was that the same stream where someone talked about renting an outside
    room in NY for a presentation, because an inhouse conference room was
    "to expensive"?
    
    Do I detect a common thread here?
    

    
    Re: .65
    
    When Mega-Corp is interested in buying zillions of dollars  of 
    equipment, the local sales support guy is not involved because 
    some fool from the puzzle palace gets to fly cross country so *HE* 
    can say *HE* got the order!
    
    This is the "cherry picking" phenomenon I noticed about a year ago.  
    
    -Ed
    

    I was wrong about a couple of things in .66. We have a local rep who
    will get some credit for the opportunity. I got him involved right away
    and is willing to invest time (mine) to try and win it. The problem is
    a networking one that I don't know if we'll be able to solve. I've got
    research to do. Damn the metrics. We got a $2.3 million deal dumped in
    our laps this morning and I am going to do whaever it takes to win it
    because there are 6 other sites where this solution will be
    implemented. I'll worry about the numbers game later this week. Can't 
    worry about numbers when in the heat of the battle.
    
    Gene

    re: .63
    
    A few coments.
    
    First off, _where_ you spend your time (industries, account, sets,
    whatever) is a _management_ issue.  It would never occur to me to goal
    people on how they split their time (they are, however, goaled on a
    CERT's number which is derived from a plan for splitting time).  That
    is an issue for me and the account managers I support to work out. 
    Individual contributors should not have responsibility for making
    business priority decision.  Full input yes, ultimate responsibility
    no.  This also quickly becomes an issue for account managers who may
    not be getting all the support they funded.  Again, the managers should
    deal with this, not push it down to you.
    
    The numbers you used as an example should be 38 charged to a customer. 
    If you spent 6 hours learning a product for a specific customer
    opportunity, that account should pay for it.  If you spent 6 hours
    doing learning that was not account-directed, then it should be general
    learning.
    
    It is a management goal of mine to _not_ have a 100% utilized unit all
    the time.  If it was always fully utilized, I could not respond to
    changing needs and new requests without reprioritizing all the work we
    are doing.  It does not always make sense to drop one of the balls you
    are juggling in order to pick up a new one.  Overall, it would be a
    _very_ dangerous thing to hand out productivity goals to individual
    contributors. You might not be working 100% because I haven't given
    you enough work or because you are lazy.  In either event, it's a
    mangement issue.
    
    SBS has a wierd algorithm for calculating chargebacks, which may not
    make sense in todays AMS environment.  You can't charge someone for more
    than 40 hours of work in a week because you don't get paid for more
    than 40 hours.  The system will, however, allow you to input hours over
    40 and it will accurately report them.  What you have to be careful
    about though is how the system allocates overhead.  SBS takes things
    like learning, vacation, sick, admin and non-specific customer time
    and allocates it to every account you supported for the period using 
    a straight ratio.  Usually not a big deal, but I suppose there might be
    some instances where it might not result in a fair allocation.  That's
    where the manager steps in and 'cooks' the numbers so that the right
    thing is done.  Again, this is not a responsibility that should be
    pushed down to you.
    
    Al
    

    One (possible) correction to -.1 -
    
    My understanding is that SBS sums 'overhead' for all specialists within
    a cost center and spreads that over all accounts supported by those
    specialists, for that period, in proportion to the amount of support
    used by that account.  Overhead is not allocated on an individual
    basis.
    
    Thanks for the guesstimate on correct hours.  I can think of a few
    reasons why this might be considered good: low overhead (20%), high
    correlation to plan (dedication to accounts)...  Note that the 20%
    overhead indicated in your model does not include vacations, holidays,
    courses...  The addition of these should pump the overhead number up to
    about 33% which is what I am seeing.
    
    It's interesting that I am not seeing the kind of pressures that your
    mgmt. seems to be facing.  I don't have a lot of pressure to
    demonstrate allocation of time to plan.  Before the end of Q1 nearly
    all of the account managers I support were looking for 'unplannned'
    help.  The pressure I am seeing is from sales people needing a lot of
    help to close sales, and account managers going over their TOTAL budget
    for support.  I don't think the account managers I support would care
    WHO did the work as long as I could provide all the needed support
    within the total budget.
    
    Peter Dillard

	re .71:

>    Damn the metrics. We got a $2.3 million deal dumped in
>    our laps this morning and I am going to do whaever it takes to win it
>    because there are 6 other sites where this solution will be
>    implemented. I'll worry about the numbers game later this week. Can't 
>    worry about numbers when in the heat of the battle.


	Go for it, Gene! We NEED people like you...

	As someone who knows nothing about this Sales stuff, I can see
	so easily what's right. It's this:

	There's $2.3 million of business out there. Gene is going to
	go for it. His manager will naturally take 5 minutes to hear
	him explain this situation, and will naturally not quibble over
	the metrics. If necessary, his manager will escalate this until
	it hits Ken Olsen's desk, and Ken will back them both up to the hilt.

	Why is the Sales function in one of the world's leading high-tech
	corporations organised like Russian agriculture?

	/Tom

Our passion for metrics reminds me of an old joke (originally from the market
research community, I think):

You see, there's this guy crawling around on the sidewalk in the middle of the 
night.  Another guy comes along and asks, "You lose something?"  

"Yup, my car keys," the first guy responds.

"Lost 'em right here?" asks the second.

"Nope, I lost 'em back in the alley."

"Then why are you crawling around out here on the side walk?"

"The light's better out here."

-dave

    Just completed entering my SBS hours for the latest reporting period.
    Spent 8 hours on an account I haven't done much with for awhile (it's a
    corporate account). Entered my time into a long known Project ID for
    that account and the time got charged to a sales rep who quit DEC and 
    left the company over 18 months ago. Maybe it doesn't matter since it's
    a corporate account. I don't know if they have multiple P&L's or not.
    Some do I think.
    
    Gene.

    re - 'you can't put in more than 40 hours, because you only get paid
    for 40 hours'.  this is ridiculous! how in the world can we get a 
    feel for how many more sales support persons (NOT RESOURCES!!!)
    we need unless we have some picture of how much effort is being
    expended by the current set of people.  I routinely work 50-60
    hours a week and report it -- if the system cannt handle that then
    junk it.
    
    BTW, from my EIS residency days, if I worked over 40 hours for a
    customer, you can be damn sure that digital wanted that reported,
    and charged a shift-differential for anything over 8 hours in a 
    day - not that I ever saw any of it, since I'm 'salaried'... Ds.

Re: .77

This SBS 40 hour stuff is just the way it is. We have a lot of people here that
regularly work long hours for a lot of reasons - the primary one is that
were are pitifully under staffed (12 technical sales support/PSSx people for
about 26 sales reps that cover all, or parts of 4 states). The geography is
such that an entire day, or even more, can be required for a single sales
call. We really have three choices:

      1. Work lots of hours and report 40 hours into the system - ignoring
         anything above that number.

      2. Work lots of hours and report lots of hours into the system. This
         will place the burden on someone to have to "normalize" the amount
         of time that goes into the system.

      3. Work 40 hours and report 40 hours.

Given all that's going on, I think lots of people are seriously considering
"door number 3".

I spent 1.5 hours this morning talking with the lady in our office who 
maintains everyone's PPPs. Real nice person. She did a good job explaining
all the codes and numbers. Bottom line is "I must be accountable for my
actions. Therefore, my contribution to the corporation must be measured".
I have never had a problem with that. It's the systems we are using to
do the measuring that are a mess. During our talk I gained a much better
perspective on the complexity, effort, and expense that is being poured 
into all these systems. It's frightening.

I received confirmation from DELTA that my note 1797.55 will be treated 
as an official DELTA recommendation and therefore presented to management
at the next meeting. Anyone know when that is? This action gaurantees me
that I will get some response. However, I am not opptimistic that anything
will, or even could, be done about all these metric systems. It's an 
unbelievably huge monster.

When I recieve the DELTA response I will ask permission to post it here. 
If denied, I will post a brief summary. Then I am going to take the advice 
someone gave me a few days ago and just wash my hands clean of this whole mess.

Gene.

    re: .77
    
    Read it more carefully before you hyperventilate.  You can enter more
    than 40 hours into SBS.  It will not CHARGE any accounts for more than 40
    hours in a week because Digital does not PAY anyone for more than 40
    hours of work.  Here are some examples, weekly rate is annual cost per
    person divided by 52:
    
    	Hours charged 		Hours worked		Charge to account
    	to account		in week
    
    	10			40			25% of weekly rate
    	40			40			100% of weekly rate
    	10			50*			20% of weekly rate
    	50			50*			100% of weekly rate
    	50			60*			5/6 of weekly rate
    
    * - assumes extra hours are direct time, not administrative/vacation or
    other overhead.
    
    OK?
    
    Al
    

re: .79

If I understand correctly, then it would be to an account teams advantage
to dump stuff on a sales support person with an impossible deadline because
the sales support hours over 40 are 'free' to the account team.

Bob

    Working more hours than are charged when the customer is the US
    Government can get DEC into really big trouble.  I once worked for
    a defense contractor and that was made very clear.  They (the DoD)
    do not want any "off the books" labor going on in support of one of their
    contracts.
    
    Just selling them something is different - the contract has not been
    signed yet.

    Working more hours than are charged is not acceptable in the
    commercial sector either.  Our customer (an aerospace firm) is heavily
    unionized, does not want labor troubles, and does not want any hint
    of "off the books" labor from a contractor.
    
    It's a bad business practice.  Stop it.

    re: .82> Stop it.
    
    Gee, someone should mention it to the Japanese...
    
    Brad.
    
    

    In the case of billable (to an external customer) work, the time worked
    is billed and our standard pricing includes uplift for OT, weekends,
    etc.
    
    In the case of sales support most specialisst (SpecialistII and above)
    are wage class IV meaning they are salaried professionals and are not
    paid overtime.  In that case wether you work 32 hours or 48 hours you
    are paid the same.  If specialists work overtime and record it in SBS,
    the data is kept but the sales team is only charged for the max. 40
    hours/week that the person in paid.  It's as though they were hired by
    sales as a WC IV and they would be paid their salary as WC IVs without
    overtime.
    
    There is the obvious issue in this case (as with any salaried employee)
    of abusing the person by requiring extensive overtime.  If an employee
    feels that this is happening the issue should be raised to management
    and if not settled, to personnel.  I don't believe the current sales
    support system makes this any worse.  In fact, it currently penalizes
    those who do an extraordinary amount of this.  Since overhead is
    summed accross a group and then distributed, if you have a subset of 
    specialist on an account that have substantially less overhead that
    account will get an unfair share of overhead allocated to it.  If this
    account had 'fit in with the group' it could have used the additional
    overhead for training and other investments to improve the ability of
    its support people.
    
    Peter 

    However, there are those of us who beleive in 'do a quality job, or
    don't do it at all' - if it takes 30 or 60 hours, just do it!
    
    Given the current understaffing of sales suport in some areas of the 
    US field, this situation DOES OCCUR, I just would hope that our
    internal systems could handle this and indicate to mgt that we might
    need more (people not resources) in a given area as indicated  by the 
    'overtime currently being expended.

	re .79:

>    Read it more carefully before you hyperventilate.  You can enter more
>    than 40 hours into SBS.  It will not CHARGE any accounts for more than 40
>    hours in a week because Digital does not PAY anyone for more than 40
>    hours of work.

	Al, now I'm hyperventilating. From remarks you've made, it seems
	that you are a people-manager. And you are telling me that "Digital
	does not PAY anyone for more than 40 hours of work".

	My understanding (based on a British contract which may be different
	from what you have in the States) is that Digital pays me to deliver
	results, the hours worked being whatever are required to do so.

	For instance: my average hours at work are about 60 per week. Plus,
	of course, an average of 5-10 hours travel, sometimes a lot more
	(as when I travel to the North of England and back for a meeting,
	in a single day as I am not allowed to stay over - say 4 hours each
	way plus 8 hours at the destination). Occasionally I might fly to
	the States and wipe out an entire day or two of my weekend travelling.

	Or, if a proposal has to be put together, some of us might work
	16 hour days for a week (no lack of appreciation intended for
	those who, I feel sure, work 16-hour days for a lot more than a
	week).

	Are you seriously asserting that Digital still only pays us for
	40 hours per week? In that case the balance, amounting to as much
	as the same again, is being done FOR FREE. That is called "slavery"
	and I thought it was illegal.

	No, either a metrics system measures reality, or it measures a
	fantasy world. I have never yet come across a Digital time measurement
	system which attempted to face up to reality. It's too complex and
	usually too discouraging.

	One last thought: in the excellent book "Peopleware" by De Marco
	and Lister, it is asserted that the most successful projects are
	often those in which no deadlines are set. Paradoxically, these
	projects have been known to be delivered far more punctually than
	those in which elaborate schedules, milestones, deadlines and
	the whole sado-masochistic apparatus have been deployed. The
	authors are experienced practising consultants with a worldwide
	reputation. Think about it. Better still, read it.

	/Tom

    ...sounds like "volunteer slavery" to me.

    re .86:
    
    The last time I was paid by the hour was when I was a grad student
    doing programming for a professor.  For all 24 years that I have had a
    "real job" I have been a salaried employee (16 years with DEC)--wage
    class 4 or "exempt."  My salary doesn't change whether I work 40 or 80
    hours a week.  Labor tickets are irrelevant; at most they might affect
    the proportion of my salary that is charged to individual projects. 
    Since I'm "overhead" anyway, labor tickets _are_ irrelevant.
    
    Workaholics may (or may not) be rewarded in other ways, but we
    certainly don't get bonuses based on the number of hours put in.
    
    --Simon
    

    re: .86
    
    Perhaps my comments need a little more context for those outside of the
    U.S.
    
    The vast majority of Sales and Sales Support are paid a fixed salary.
    For the purposes of allocating charges INTERNALLY, Digital uses a U.S.
    standard 40 hour work week. 
    
    Say the loaded cost per person is $104K - not far from reality.  The
    cost per week is $2K and the cost per hour (based on a 40 hour work
    week) is $50.  People are paid the same salary each week whether they
    work 40, 50, 80 or whatever hours.  The cost to Digital is $2000 a
    week. As a result, SBS doesn't allocate $2500 in charges for, as an
    example, a 50 hour week, only $2000.
    
    Regarding some of the other comments:
    
    There are good managers and there are bad managers in the company. 
    Hopefully, I don't fall to the bad end of the spectrum. I can't tell
    you how others feel about the casual overtime issue, but I can tell you my
    time management philosophy in two sentences: I expect results. Don't 
    confuse motion and progress.
    
    I think I (and most other managers I know) am smart enough to prevent
    overwork from becoming an issue.  A weekend or late night here or there 
    comes with the territory and can't be avoided. If I see it becoming a 
    habit, I look for the underlying cause and fix it. 
    
    Some people work extra hour habitually because they see it as a way of
    accomplishing more and getting an edge on their peers.  They are
    ambitious and tend to be rewarded more than the average employee.  Others 
    put in extra hours and accomplish no more than an average employee working 
    the typical 40 hour week. Both are deserving of the same compensation, 
    even though the former expends more energy, because the results are the 
    same.
    
    At any rate, this has strayed from the main topic.  Enough for now...
    
    Al
    

    Re:83
    
    Routinely expecting people to work hours that are not tracked, billed,
    or paid for is a bad business practice.  It allows organizations to
    squander their only real asset - people.
    
    The success of the Japanese has nothing to do with working unpaid
    hours.  The dominate their chosen fields because they systematically
    improve marketing, engineering, and manufacturing procedures, and make
    them all work together as a system.

    BTW, quite a few U.S. companies DO pay their WC4 employees a form
    of overtime.  It's fairly common in the Aerospace, guvmint contracting
    world.  It has to be planned, etc., and typically the WC4 employee is
    compensated for overtime at straight time, i.e., no time-and-a-arf,
    etc.
    
    If Digital had a policy calling for this kind of project/program
    related overtime, perhaps management would be doing a little better
    job of watching the store.
    
    Just a thought.......Dick

RE: Only reporting 40 hours a week.

We (Sales support) routinely report that actual number of hours worked
(- those hours over 40 that would adversely affect the metric of the
week of course).  Over the past few month I have been developing some
software, in addition to my sales support duties, that had no specific
customer in mind but was something that I thought that people might like
once they saw it.  This has resulted in my working 90+ hours in several
weeks recentl.  I have been reporting all of this time.  Well lo and
behold someone decided that they had to have the stuff that I developed.
The final deal has not been worked out but the customer seems to have
agreed to pay for the software by an hourly rate times the hours spent
developing the software.

If I had only been reporting 40 hours a week then there would be no
record of all those hours that someone is now willing to pay for
retroactively.

John

In the late '70's, the SWS CLARS system always pro-rata'd down your time
down to 40 hours for management reporting. At least our local manager
could also see the real hours too...
								- Ian W.

    re: back several
    
    The chart showing the amount accounts were charged.
    
    I do not doubt one bit that this is the way that things are being
    charged.  And it illustrates one of the major flaws in the system.  A
    person works a 80 hour week but only 40 of it is for one account.  That
    account only get charged for 1/2 of a person, even though he did a full
    week's worth of work.  How does this kind of a measurement system
    really reflect the amount of work being done by sales support?  Yes,
    all the fractions add up to one, because the person is only being paid
    that amount.  But it does in no way reflect the fact that another
    person is needed.  And sales managers (particularly blue line) may
    never know that they are using a full person when they are only getting
    billed for half a person.
    
    tgc

re: 1797.92               The Metrics Are Killing Us                   92 of 92
>RE: Only reporting 40 hours a week.
>
>(- those hours over 40 that would adversely affect the metric of the

>If I had only been reporting 40 hours a week then there would be no
>record of all those hours that someone is now willing to pay for
>retroactively.

This topic has been discussed many times, and all for good reason.

Very briefly, several years ago (pre-DEC days), I had knowledge of a 
salary pay dispute between a 'salaried' technican and a company who billed by 
the hour to clients.

It was clearly in the "best" interest of managment to get as many extra hours 
out of these technicians as possible, for billing purposes. However, the 
technicians were told not to report mor than forty hours on their 
payroll time card, as it made no sense.

One of the technicians called the Labor  Bureau, and they cited a case where
salaried employees sued their employer for 'back overtime worked' (which
the labor bureau calculated to be 1/2 the hourly pay or $10/hr , whichever
was less). However, and this is the point, only those employees who 
reported the full number of hours were eligible for the settlement.

Since the employees at this small company were in the lowest category
for labor Bureau Representataion; the waiting time would be 2 - 3 years 
to have their case heard; although the LB wold notify the employeer 
immediately to  get  copies of the time slips.

In some companies, there are other compensations besides pay to encourage
people to work longer hours. Job satsifaction being one. 

Bob

Miano & Early, et Al,

In a former life I spent all week away from home life for six months.  Lots of
"overtime emergency" work and travel to the other part of the state.  Worked
for organization X.  Another organization, Y, doing another part of the
project, was told to keep a record of their overtime  (X and Y were both
departments of a bigger organization).   We were not told this and never heard
about it until the following was a done deal.  Eventually the feds paid a lot
of the bill and the other guys got some BIG settlements two years later for
that overtime. Guess what we got?  Read the PS for one possible reason why it
was not reasonable to push the issue. 

I still put in lots of overtime (in DEC now) without reporting it because I
do it for myself and have had too much experience that unless there are $
attached to it - up front - it does not matter at all - to anyone.  I say I
do it for myself, and actually resent it when it is implied that I should/must
do it.  Never got over "going to school".  I guess my principal reason is that
life is interesting and fun.  Is that a principle?  Read on.

Fred

PS:  Now the interesting/personal part.

Anyone read recently about the controversy over closing down that Arkansas
town for being seeded with DIOXIN?  Claims by some of the principal players are
now surfacing that the actions taken were very overblown (recently in Time
Mag).  In hind-sight, and I remember thinking the same dangerous thoughts about
Love Canal at the time. There were/are big careers made in the environments
business!  Not mine.

10-15 years ago I worked as a temp/probationary job for the state X Dept. 
I was assigned to the big "Love Canal Project" fiasco as a chemist (orig
profession) / pilot (the original photos on TV were mine and a state's
photographer) / all-around-do-anything-guy.  There were even a couple of
assignments that we (photographer and I) were assigned to take photos of/(in)
private property where "important" people had been threatened with firearms
(made the local newspapers in the location).  "This is private property - get
off" - to elected gov't reps - big time folks.  Our last time we saw them
(the guns) ourselves!  Since the location was far away we did not know of the
danger beforehand.  But, I had the person who assigned us to that part of the
project admit he knew of those threatening situations - after our "incident".
I asked him about it.  In fairness to him we were told to be "careful" - end
and total content of warning! I have often suspected that that knowledge was
(one of?) the reasons I lost that job.  Course I was told something else.  Life
has been interesting! 

I am now wrestling with the question, would SERP and its consequences be more
interesting than Alpha? 
    

	re .89:

>    At any rate, this has strayed from the main topic.  Enough for now...

	I don't see that this discussion of the hours people work,
	the hours the company charges for, the hours employees get
	paid for, and the metrics systems used to track all this,
	can be a rathole. It looks straight down the middle of the
	topic to me.

	However, I do see that there are different issues rolled together,
	and it's an emotive area (work, remuneration, promotion, etc).

	(1) What hours are we paid for? I think we seem to be agreeing
	    that most employees involved in the software and services
	    part of the business are "salaried professionals", who do
	    not get paid for a fixed number of hours per week. So much
	    for that issue.

	(2) What do we charge customers for? Well, obviously, results.
	    In some cases, we bill them for the actual work done, which
	    has to be the number of hours put in. Now, by some management
	    magic which I don't pretend to understand, it may be possible
	    to bill a customer for 40 hours' work when actually 80 hours'
	    work was done. If that does happen, the customer is obviously
	    doing well out of it, and is hardly likely to complain. The
	    company is probably doing quite well too. The employee? Well,
	    this is where I see a link to issue (1) - if the employee is
	    doing 80 hours for the sake of the business, and reporting 40,
	    all sorts of bad consequences follow:

		- The employee is not getting credit for the work done.

		- The company is making its numbers with half the employees
		  it should really have.

		- The company is probably making all sorts of profoundly
		  wrong deductions about what "resources" it needs.

	Further:

>    I think I (and most other managers I know) am smart enough to prevent
>    overwork from becoming an issue.  A weekend or late night here or there 
>    comes with the territory and can't be avoided. If I see it becoming a 
>    habit, I look for the underlying cause and fix it. 
>    
>    Some people work extra hour habitually because they see it as a way of
>    accomplishing more and getting an edge on their peers.  They are
>    ambitious and tend to be rewarded more than the average employee.  Others 
>    put in extra hours and accomplish no more than an average employee working 
>    the typical 40 hour week. Both are deserving of the same compensation, 
>    even though the former expends more energy, because the results are the 
>    same.

	It's not so simple. Maybe Al is one of the managers who shelters his
	people from the prevailing winds, in which case he deserves credit
	for doing the right thing.

	But there are all sorts of subtle influences which conspire to make
	employees work longer hours. In the facility where I work, we find
	that traffic patterns mean you have to come to work before 0800 or
	after 0900 - and leave before 1630 or after 1900. To avoid the
	appearance of poor time-keeping or (worse) missing important
	meetings, we tend to come in before 0800 and leave after 1900.
	Of course, a manager may well say "that's your choice". Then there
	is the need to do 1001 "little things" that have to be done. Those
	who wish to progress in the company are often advised to "work
	smarter, not harder" and "delegate more". Ever wonder who these
	people delegate to? Ever wonder when the delegated work gets done?
	Maybe better not... Now we have an even better influence: "Better
	do this, we have to identify another 500 people whose jobs aren't
	necessary".

	Lastly, Al says that some of those working longer hours "accomplish
	no more than the average employee". By what metrics? By those which
	insist that "nobody works more than 40 hours"?

	/Tom

    re: .97
    
    First, let me clear up a point.  When I talk about reporting hours, I
    am talking about SBS (a system).  The customers are other parts of
    Digital i.e. other Sales organizations.  The system allows you to input
    more than 40 hours in a week (and will generate effort reports with
    said extra hours) but will charge the rest of Digital no more than 40
    hours of charges in a given week.  I should hope that the accounting
    soundness of this is obvious, no? 
    
    As for your latter comment:  I have had the opportunity to manage
    people in the capacity of both project manager and line manager for a
    number of years. I can draw some generalities from observation. Some
    people are highly motivated and effective; at the other end of the
    spectrum are the lazy and ineffective.  There is a relatively broad
    range of acceptable; within that range the more effective (as measured
    in an absolute sense) will be promoted faster and earn more than the
    less effective.  Similarly, for two people with equal skills, the one
    who works more hours will be more effective.  Conservation of matter
    and energy applied to human dynamics, as it were.
    
    Where are we going with this, anyway??
    
    Al
    
    
    

    Well I have gone through all 98 replies and what more can I say, but
    you are all right.
    
    As far as my PPP my manager gave me a copy and said sign this! I read
    it and it made some sense but not much. It was very clear that in order
    for me to be a "success" in FY92 my account set needed to make it's
    number $10.5M. It was made clear to me that in order for me to get to DEC100
    the account set number must be met.
    
    We never spoke of SBS or entering certian amounts of time to accounts.
    I submit SBS time every week and it totals 40 hours even if I worked
    80. The extra time to me is not worth reporting because I do not track
    all the "nonsense" ie mail, notes, bathroom visits etc etc. I report
    customer activity time and that's it.
    
    To SBS in its present form is worthless information, but I do it
    because it's required. If NMS is basing account manpower requirements
    on SBS they are nuts.
    
    FJK

    This discussion is larger than you think..
    
    In Europe it has been estimated that each year $300m is spent on the 
    design,engineering,running and support of Systems which support the
    Business processes. This is just the IS component it doesn't include
    the adminstration, management interpretation, data entry etc which is
    probably as significant..
    
    It can be easily proved that although people feel that change is the
    main reason for this high cost, transaction processing systems are very
    little impacted by change in business. The basic core process of taking
    orders,billing,paying creditors, paying salaries doesn't change.. What
    changes is the management information that is imbedded within them and
    the metrics systems that are layered around them... These are mapped
    agains our structure and metrics process... every time they change the
    systems have to follow..
    
    I would guess that only 5% of our systems in place today do real
    transaction processing.
    
    Now if you look at this... I think there are about 25000 employees in
    Europe (it changes on aquisitions and who is Dec and who is ? etc)
    
    That means the IS costs alone are $12,000 per employee... Add onto this
    the other costs and costs of whole groups who are employed to use these
    measurements..... And the total cost is quite staggering...
    
    Now we are told that Europe are quite lean compared to the other Areas
    and there are a lot of people looking at this very issue very seriously
    here..
    
    Whats happening elsewhere I don't have data on.
    
    As I said its a much bigger Business issue than just Sales performance 
    metrics and its been with us for years... We just didn't feel it because
    we where in good times..Money flowed !
    
    We need to decide if the amount of control and measurement we employ
    today actually shows a return on the considerable investement and cost
    of ownership that will be/is experienced.
    
    
    Chris

Several observations:

1)	When we proposed a new order administration system for DECdirect a
	couple of years back, I counted half the pages of a very thick OR
	as being finance related. The rest pertained to the required
	functionality to administer transaction flows and to provide the
	data needed to manage the business operationally (I was the business
	rep on the steering committee at that time).

2)	Basic Business data is locked behind strategic, customised front ends 
	built in FOCUS. DECquery would sort all my reporting needs without
	having to have someone else write me a report every time I need to
	answer basic, ad-hoc questions. This has been requested but not yet
	granted.

3)	The internal complexity of our transaction systems and the way they
	interplay make running a business horrendously difficult. At the time
	of writing, I cannot get a figure for (say) the total size of the
	software products business by segments FYTD within 20% of the actual 
	total reported on my P&L.

Meanwhile, one of our distributors who run their business on a large VAXcluster
can log onto any terminal and give you the total sales volume and margin ytd 
for any product, account or customer contact that they deal with.

I admire Peter Herke's SME operation for going outside and buying the same
software for use within Digital SME...
								- Ian W.

    I've never heard of a Personal Performance Plan before. Is every
    employee supposed to have one of these (and sign it), or only sales
    support employees? What does the PPP contain?
    
    Cathy

re: .98  ALOS01::KOZAKIEWICZ "Shoes for industry"

>   The system allows you to input
>    more than 40 hours in a week (and will generate effort reports with
>    said extra hours) but will charge the rest of Digital no more than 40
>    hours of charges in a given week.  I should hope that the accounting
>    soundness of this is obvious, no? 

	I agree that this is a sound accounting practice for accrueing
	actual costs.  However, thos same SBS numbers are being used to
	determine the needed staffing levels for the support organization.
	If two people are each working 60 hours every week and the sales
	force is only getting charged for 80 hours, that means that the
	actual support requirements are being understated by 40 hours.

	Sales managers will only see the 80 hours expended on their
	accounts.  When budgeting for next year, they will base their
	projected needs on what they were charged for this year.  They
	should see what they actually used, not what they were charged.

	Where this really gets bad is the situation I described earlier
	where the time each week is being split between accounts (the
	general case).  If the support person works more than 40 hours,
	the sales manager only gets charged a fraction of the ACTUAL
	hours expended.  This means that the projection of required 
	support will be understated.  Management will have to cut staff
	because sales managers are stating that they don't need as much
	support.

	This is where the pain exists in the system for us grunts.  We
	say the data is bad going in, and then to compound the problem,
	the way that data is being munged makes a bad matter worse.  And
	management decisions ARE being made on this data.  This is the
	very reason that we are saying that the best thing would be to
	scrap the time reporting, just for sales support.  It contains
	bogus data and it is not reporting things accurately.

tgc

re: 102

>    I've never heard of a Personal Performance Plan before. Is every
>    employee supposed to have one of these (and sign it), or only sales
>    support employees? What does the PPP contain?

	My understanding is that everyone is supposed to have one, although
	this is the first year (been with Dig 12 years) that I have ever
	seen one.  Below is a copy of the one I submitted back in Sep of
	91.  The problems have arisen on the first page, which has
	been constantly changing.  My second page has not changed.  I have
	no fear of posting the first page, because since I created it,
	I have never seen it looking like this again.  Codes were inserted
	instead of English descriptions and team and quantitative goals
	have been in a constant flux (with no discussion with us).  This
	is where changes were made and we were asked to sign.  To show the
	`strangeness' of this, my goal is now based on one account set.
	I spend maybe 50% of my time working with that account set, yet
	my entire measurement is based on that account set.  I tried
	talking to manager about that to make it more reflective of the
	type of job I perform, but did not get anywhere.  (I now have a
	different manager, but I have decided that it is just too much of
	a hassle to try to make management decisions.)

tgc

                             ACCOUNT SELLING TEAM
                    PERSONAL PERFORMANCE PLAN (Individual)
                                     FY92

+-------------------------------------+------------------------------+--------+
| Name                                | Badge                        |Date    |
|       >Tim Cerling                  |        >90912                |>Sep,91 |
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| Account (Set)                       | Location                   Code       |
|       >Commercial                   | >Minneapolis, Minnesota    >MPO       |
+-------------------------------------+----------------+----------------------+
| Job Code                   Title                     |Function              |
|       >52AE           >S/W Consultant I              | >Sys Sales Support   |
+--------------------------+---------------------------+----------------------+
| Industry               % | Industry                % | Job Specialty        |
|       >             >    |      >               >    | >Imaging/VMS         |
+--------------------------+---------------------------+----------------------+
| Team Type                        Name                            Code       |
|       >Account Set     >Commercial                                >         |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Eligibility:                                                                |
|              TEAM100, DEC100, COE     >                                     |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                             |
|                           MARGIN               ORDERS    EXPENSES           |
|                +----$----+----%----+      +---------+----------+            |
| TEAM GOAL #1   |>        |>        |      |>        |>         |            |
|                +---------+---------+      +---------+----------+            |
|                                                                             |
| TEAM GOAL #2  > Commercial unit certs budget                                |
|                                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SECTION 1:  QUANTITATIVE                                                    |
|                                                                             |
|    Individual Goal                                                          |
|                                                                             |
|                 +---------+                                                 |
| TOTAL DOLLARS   |>1.5 M   |   of:  >Image related sales                     |
|                 +---------+                                                 |
|      OR                                                                     |
|                 +---------+                                                 |
| TOTAL UNITS     |>        |   of: >                                         |
|                 +---------+                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|SIGNATURES:                                                                  |
+---------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+
|Individual:                |Account Mgr:               |Account Group Mgr:   |
|                           |                           |                     |
+---------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+


                                      -2-





     Personal Performance Plan:  Commitments for Individual Member on Team


+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                            |
| SECTION 2:   BUSINESS GENERATION                                           |
|                                                                            |
|      >a)  3-4 separate proposals for imaging or related products           |
|       b)  Obtain two new imaging customers or new projects in existing     |
|           customers                                                        |
|                                                                            |
| SECTION 3:   COST REDUCTION                                                |
|                                                                            |
|      >a)  Presentation of 1 or 2 Discovery seminars                        |
|       b)  Personal travel expense control through advance planning         |
|                                                                            |
|                                                                            |
| SECTION 4:    CUSTOMER FOCUS                                               |
|                                                                            |
|      >a)  Present Digital's imaging strategy / products to 6 prospects     |
|       b)  Develop one image reference site                                 |
|       c)  Treat all cross-functional peers as customers                    |
|                                                                            |
| SECTION 5:    PROFESSIONAL / PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT                          |
|                                                                            |
|      >a)  Become an Image Partner                                          |
|       b)  Attend in-depth image training at the FTC                        |
|       c)  Continue mentoring role for junior employees                     |
|       d)  Provide other leadership functions as called upon                |
|                                                                            |
| SECTION 6:    OTHER                                                        |
|                                                                            |
|      >a)  Present imaging awareness class to sales to increase awareness   |
|           of imaging opportunities                                         |
|       b)  Accurate (as allowed by system) SBS time entry                   |
|       c)  Be recognized as a team player                                   |
|                                                                            |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|SIGNATURES:                                                                 |
+---------------------------+---------------------------+--------------------+
|Individual:                |Account Mgr:               |Account Group Mgr:  |
|                           |                           |                    |
+---------------------------+---------------------------+--------------------+

re: .101


"3)	The internal complexity of our transaction systems and the way they
	interplay make running a business horrendously difficult. At the time
	of writing, I cannot get a figure for (say) the total size of the
	software products business by segments FYTD within 20% of the actual 
	total reported on my P&L.


I'm afraid that I must take exception to the above statement. I have worked in DEC
IS for 12 years, most of that spent with the transaction systems.

I will certainly not defend the indefensible. Most of our systems are cumbersome
to use, exorbitantly expensive to maintain, and can't keep up with changing times.

BUT, one of the prime reasons for these problems is that the business practices
which those systems have been ordered to implement are bizarre beyond belief.

Just a couple of examples: The field service systems don't calculate prices the
way Focus does because the two different business organizations can't agree on
the correct way.  Focus and SMART don't use the same part number files or even
format, despite 8 years of striving for a corporate wide reference system. Why?
because the field service business and the admin business won't agree on one
right way. I could go on for days but you should get the picture.

When you automate absurd practices you only get faster and/or more absurd results.

Oh BTW, the reason you can't get 
				"a figure for (say) the total size of the
	software products business by segments FYTD within 20% of the actual 
	total reported on my P&L."

Is that no one can define for IS what the software products business is and
how to measure its size or segmentation.

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) holds on the design as well as the data entry 
level.

Alan

I take exception to the comments in .-1

We have one system that feeds the accounts systems that treats header
allowances one way but doesn't give you line item data. We have another
warehouse that treats header allowances a different way but gives us line
item detail - but the financials consistently overstate.

Customer details sit in a third warehouse.

I can clearly articulate to IS what the segment splits are. I even gave them
the table that I filled in by hand, nice and machine readable.

In the scheme of things, i'm supposed to be the customer...
								- Ian W.

WRONG, you are NOT the IS customer. Maybe you should be but you are not.

The IS customers are the group(s) paying the bill. Now, that is a general
statement and I obviously don't know your particular circumstances, but, 
do you control the budgets for all the IS groups involved in all three warehouses
and all the systems you mention?

While you can give your definitions can you honestly say that everyone who
does control those budgets agrees with you?

One more example:

I personally tried to produce a functional specification for pricing in a new
system. I was in contact with 4 major business organizations and talked with
maybe 20 people. All of these organizations had some measure of authority
and/or responsibility for determining how prices, discounts, uplifts and 
allowances are to be done.

I got 3 major variants and at least 2 sub-variants within each major one.
None of the variations was consistent across the product spectrum and half of
them violated US government regulations. 

The most rational and flexible and IMHO appropriate specification was not even
considered. Why? The organization proposing it had no dollars on the table.

The IM&T problems in this company are not "construction problems". They are
architectural and people problems.  Architectural in the sense of we don't agree
on what we are building, and people in the sense that too many people involved
in the process of creating an IS system don't know how to do the job (i.e. the
folks with the money design the system though they know little about the
business the system is to perform and less about systems design)

Alan

   Re:                     <<< Note 1797.107 by VAULT::CRAMER >>>

>do you control the budgets for all the IS groups involved in all
>three warehouses and all the systems you mention?

>While you can give your definitions can you honestly say that
>everyone who does control those budgets agrees with you?

   I understand your frustration.  Somehow, we have ignored some
   common sense in our attempts to be "politically correct" with
   respect to "consensus management", "decentralization", and so
   on.
   
   Common sense principle number 1:
   
      If you don't know how to do something manually, you are
      not competent to write the spec for automating it.
      
   Common sense principle number 2:
   
      No single cost or profit center "owns" the Digital
      information resource nor is any of them accountable for
      assuring we can communicate as a single business.  So,
      integration is on nobody's agenda and doesn't get any
      budget allocation.
      
   Common sense principle number 3:
   
      Having signatory responsiblity for a budget doesn't
      magically make you competent to spend it on information
      processing systems.  Maybe the competency should be part
      of the qualifications for having the money, but it isn't.
      
There seems to be no way to institutionalize common sense, so we
may as well face up to it.  Information Systems in Digital will
always look like a horse designed by a committee.  That is one
of the root causes for administrative inefficiency in any
company larger than the number of people who can fit into a
conference room.

So it goes...

Dick

Amen, brother, Amen!!!!!!


There may be a silver lining in the dark clouds of DECs current position.

In the US IS is reorganizing under John Walshe. John seems to be building
an organization based on the common sense principles you have mentioned.

I will maintain a healthy skeptisism for he may not be able to pull it off, but,
from what I've seen of him I expect one heck of an attempt.

Alan

Control of the budgets is largely in organisations that are disconnected
from the business need. Items as in .-2 (trying to get rational discounts
and allowancing automated) are something that some of the DECdirect folks
here highlighted and issued a proposal to the simplification programme. It
was certainly fixing far more special cases than you identified here.

You can probably tell that I don't have complete control over the budgets;
these things sit behind all sorts of smoke and mirrors.

In the interim, we're yet to find any significant competitor who have the
same 'quality' of internal mess that we seem to have... unless you know
differently!

Integration is very much an IM&T added value. So is giving us quality
information management systems that help to run the business(es). If this
task is impossible, we should be buying the added value elsewhere.

								- Ian W.

   Re:             <<< Note 1797.110 by IW::WARING "Simplicity sells" >>>

>Integration is very much an IM&T added value. So is giving us quality
>information management systems that help to run the business(es). If this
>task is impossible, we should be buying the added value elsewhere.

   It isn't impossible, but it requires separating the IM&T
   organization from the stovepipes the rest of the company has.  
   
   By that I mean, that the following should _NOT_ exist:
   
      1) US IM&T, GIA IM&T, EUROPE IM&T - we need to have IM&T
         responsive to needs for communications between the
         geographies, not helping them to build walls.
         
      2) Engineering IM&T, Marketing IM&T, Manufacturing IM&T,
         Financial IM&T, Legal IM&T, Sales IM&T, Service IM&T -
         We need to have IM&T acting as glue between the
         stovepipes, not as bricks between them.
         
   In general, my recommendation is that _every_ IM&T
   organization should be positioned on interfaces between
   stovepipes and should derive its budget from integrating the
   internal information processing with the communication
   needed.  Perhaps none of the "customers" should foot the
   bill, maybe the BOD should recognize it as a "strategic
   investment" like bricks and mortar.
   
fwiw,

   Dick

re: -1 

You, too, have hit the nail on the head.

re: -2

"Integration is very much an IM&T added value. So is giving us quality
"information management systems that help to run the business(es). If this
"task is impossible, we should be buying the added value elsewhere.

	You may think that integration is added value, unfortunately others 
	(usually those in control of IM&T budgets) don't agree. IS is 
	capable of providing both quality and integration, but, they are actively
	prevented from doing either, at least according to my definitions, in
	all too many cases.

	As far as buying integration...thanks for the laugh.  I did an analysis
	two years ago of packages which had the potential for replacing SMART.
	Guess what? There isn't a package anywhere that comes close to supporting
	the Byzantine business rules "required". So, no package. One business
	type told me that he hoped we could bring in a package as a way to
	tumble those business rules and the bureaucracies that spawned them.
	....He's gone now. 

I think we're in general agreement. If the business rules aren't implementable
in a system, then it's the business rules that need the attention. That's been
the approach here.

As for SMART, there are significant business simplifications that would help
that along as well. At the time of writing, less than 1/3 of all software
licences end up on any support contract here. I haven't seen much work on any
continuous improvements to find out why this is the case, and what we can do
to up the penetration.

All of this still doesn't address the fundamentals needed to run a business:

1)	The sum of all business segments should equal the total
2)	The time to find out how many <x> we've sold this year shouldn't
	take me several days a pop
3)	Finding out which customers have bought what similarly shouldn't
	take me out for a significant time to manually put several data
	sources together
4)	If i'm measured on NOR, I need financial detail that doesn't need
	me to take numbers and interpretations from more than three
	different systems to *guess* what's really going on.

My business is selling software products. I don't want to be in the IM&T
business at all...
								- Ian W.

Yeah, I'd say we are in basic agreement.

As far as I, the IS person, goes, your number 3 is the biggest frustration.
We don't even know how to identify a customer! Granted it isn't simple but, to
me, it seems rather important.

When you say customer, do you mean the bill payer? the division? where products 
are installed? a regional sub-division? a functional sub-division? etc. etc.

It's simple enough for those businesses with one location, but, start to expand
and it becomes impossible for us. (No, it shouldn't be; but it is)


So....how do we fix it?  Personally, I think John Walshe has the right idea, but,
it will take some time.


Alan

    
    well, go back 15 to 20 years, and you will find that most IM
    fragmentation came about because IM organizations could not keep
    pace with ever changing business changes.  When you are constantly
    dumping new requirements on an organization that serves many masters,
    that organization quickly becomes defensive, and erects it's own 
    walls and creates its own stovepipes.
    
    This was true of both IM and financial services.  A re-centralization
    reorg happened in the late 70's in the FA&T world (which had many
    many conflicting databases in existance), which promptly fell flat
    on it's face when the change to eliminate Product Lines occured. We
    can find fault in all sorts of individuals who refused to stand up
    to pressure to do it in an impossible time-frame, but that is always
    much easier said than done! (Being right can be real-painfull - first
    when you fight the battle, and even worse once you've been proven
    right - you become an even bigger enemy!)
    
    You can make a very valid case that much of this failure to cope is
    poor design (as far as ability to make changes with quick turn around).
    But quality development is continually compromised either by the
    need to hire poor or unexperienced talent, and the sheer business
    pressure to react to the marketplace.   This is a tough business!
    Ideal solutions are very hard to come by.  Where is the future path
    that will garrentee enough stability to implement big changes and
    still keep us a profitable, viable entity???
    
    I'm not saying the changes can't be made, and i certainly understand
    your frustration (i have some history of being outspoken in the IS
    world, although that was long ago and far away) but it will take
    much smarts, tons of patience, and a true understanding of what drives
    business behaviors to even cope with such a large change!
    
    
    	bob

    For a thorough discussion of how PPPs are intended to be utilized by
    Sale Support and how SBS is used to provide Sales Support effort and
    expense information to NMS, see notes conference
    GERBIL::US_SALES_SERVICE, notes 87.26 - 87.28.

    re: .116
    
    Elden's response in GERBIL::US_SALES_SERVICE was thoughtful and
    revealing, IMHO. And troubling, too.
    
    One point that was clearly made was that "cooking" the SBS numbers to
    meet some metric or other was a very bad thing. I inferred that using
    the PPP's for this purpose was, if not a "bad" thing, at least an
    inappropriate use of the PPP. I'm sure that the 1st through
    nth line US field managers will get the message, 'cause it came from on
    high.
    
    That's what worries me the most. 
    
    It seems to me that this whole bruhaha comes from a management
    technique where you manage to the metrics, rather than running your
    business and leading your people. It's "suck up, s**t down" management
    philosophy at its zenith when you re-write people's job plans and stick
    them in the ICs' faces with an implicit "sign here or die" message. Why
    do I get the feeling that the closest some of these managers come to
    knowing what their "resources" are doing is reading the report of their
    time that comes out of SBS?
    
    Does anybody else sense this? Or am I turning into a paranoid
    conspiracy theorist? From the volume of responses, I'm guessing that
    .0's manager isn't the only one who does this kind of thing, by a long
    shot.

    
    
    
    There is a LOT we (DEC) can learn from the following document. It talks
    a lot about the subject of this topic. It's long, but definitely worth
    reading. I encourage one and all to feel free to extract and forward it
    at will. Please keep in mind this document is making the rounds thru
    the mail systems on the EASYnet. IMHO, we (DEC) desperately need to
    implement just about every evaluation stated in the following.
    
    Rgds,
    
    Gene.
    
    
************************************************************************
    These notes were written by a Dupont employee who attended the Deming 
    seminar in February. There are many thought provoking remarks herein 
    regarding variable compensation for Sales, on performance management in 
    general, and the value of performance ratings. This is a long document, 
    but well worth reading.
    
    
    
    
                            DEMING SEMINAR
                           FEB 17-21, 1992
                           ---------------
     
         These are my notes from attending a seminar led by the
    legendary Quality guru, Dr. W. Edward Deming. 
    
         There were about 600 people there including
    representatives from: AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Exxon, GE, IBM, &
    Merck. The session was sponsored by the Philadelphia Area
    Council for Excellence (PACE) which is part of the
    Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. PACE's mission is for the
    Delaware Valley to have world-renowned business success
    through the teachings of Dr. Deming. PACE consists of
    hundreds of organizations throughout the Delaware Valley area
    including Hercules and ICI; Dupont is not a member.  The
    seminar was the 10th that PACE has sponsored featuring Dr.
    Deming.
     
         Key learnings from the seminar were:
     
         * Although Dr. Deming is noted for Quality and
    statistical process control, his central message is that we
    must transform our approach to management of our businesses
    in order to compete in the world.
     
         * One must think of a business as a system. Following is
    a simple model of key parts of a business system:
     
     
     
        F <--------F <----------F <------------F <------------ F
        !         /\ !         /\ !           /\ !             !
        !          ! !          ! !            ! !             !
        !          ! !          ! !            ! !             !
        V          ! V          ! V            ! V             !
        A ---------> B ---------> C -----------> D ----------> E
     
     
    WHERE:
      A: Suppliers
      B: Production
      C: Sales
      D: Distribution
      E: Customers
      F: Feedback to all parts of the system
     
         The point is that all people in a system must think of
    themselves as within a system since they can't realistically
    isolate themselves from the system. The Aim (Purpose) of
    the system and everyone in the system should be to work
    together to optimize the system as a whole. That way everyone
    wins.
     
         * The key to improving a system is the method. It is
    better to focus on a method of improvement rather than goals,
    objectives or results. The numbers can be manipulated
    especially in an environment of fear. He recommends companies
    eliminate the MBO approach to management. A key question to
    ask about improvement is: "By what method?"
     
         * Deming recommends companies work to drive our fear.
    Fear inhibits innovation and productivity.
     
         * We must stop management tampering with the system.
    Usually this is caused by lack of understanding of the
    difference between special cause and common cause. This
    results in management taking inappropriate action which
    causes waste and lower productivity which is exactly the
    opposite of what they hope to accomplish.
     
         * Deming recommends that organizations become learning
    organizations. We should create a "yearning for learning."
    There is no substitute for knowledge.
     
         * Deming recommends we create a constancy of purpose. We
    need to stop short-term thinking and short term programs.
    There is no instant pudding! We need a long-term commitment.
     
         * We need LEADERSHIP not management or supervision to
    accomplish the transformation. We need leaders that listen to
    and serve the people.
     
         * America is being ruined by "best efforts." Everyone
    doing their best is not enough! The key is to work together
    to improve the system as a whole. Deming conducted the famous
    "Red bead experiment" where willing workers doing their best
    produced red beads (defects) even though they were not
    wanted.  Deming's point is that we should not punish the
    people for only doing their best; they can only produce what
    the system will deliver. We must focus efforts on improving
    the system.
     
         * There is a natural distribution of capabilities &
    contributions of people in a business system. The key is to
    enhance and develop everyone and not destroy the will of
    people to contribute to improvement of the system as a whole.
     
         * Dr. Deming strongly recommends eliminating performance
    ratings and rankings of individual people. He mentioned it
    dozens of times during the session. He directed people to go
    back to their work places and eliminate performance ratings
    Monday Morning! Some of the key reasons discussed in the
    seminar were:
     
           - Ratings foster competition within the system.
     
           - Ratings inhibit teamwork (limit interdependence and
             cooperation).
     
           - Ratings foster mediocrity. People tend to set safe
             goals they can easily meet.
     
           - Ratings increase variability since they represent
             what Dr. Deming calls management tampering with the
             system.
     
           - Ratings cause focus on the short-term. Why try to
             develop something for the long-term health of the
             business if one is rated on annual objectives?
     
           - Ratings tend to destroy intrinsic motivation (joy
             and pride in work).
     
           - One cannot separate people from the system. What we
             might really be rating is the results of the system
             and the "style" of the person. Dr. Deming says
             that since people work within a system, only 3% of
             the perceived performance is due to the people and
             97% is due to the system!
     
           - Ratings inhibit risk-taking and innovation. People
             are afraid to admit mistakes especially to their
             bosses.
     
           - Ratings tend to destroy self-esteem.
     
           - Ratings cause focus on pleasing the boss vs.
             pleasing the customer.
     
           - Ratings foster sub-optimization. This means that
             people are not focused on the purpose of
             optimizing the system as a whole. Individuals are
             more worried about "What's in it for me?"
     
           - Ratings focus on goals and objectives without
             consideration of "By what method?"
     
           - Ratings tend to reward style not true contribution.
     
           - An individual's "performance" really can't be
             measured.
     
           - Ratings tend to focus on quantity not Quality.
     
           - Ratings destroy morale and joy in work.
     
           - Judging people does not help them do a better job.
     
           - Ranking people is a FARCE. Apparent "performance" is
             actually attributable mostly to the system not to
             the individual.
     
           - Ratings don't focus on improving the system.
     
           - Having workers doing their best is not good enough
             for business success.
     
           - The ratings system punishes people; it creates
             winners and losers.
     
           - Ratings instill fear in people (carrot & stick
             approach to motivating people).
     
           - Ratings cause people to deny their true needs
             for personal growth; they don't want to admit
             weaknesses.
     
           - Ratings destroy trust between people and managers.
     
           - Ratings cause bosses to be judges rather than
             coaches and counselors.
     
           - Ratings causes bosses to talk more than they listen
             to their people because of the power inequity.
     
           - Ratings become a label that sticks with the employee
             and limits growth and development. Top rated people
             don't feel like they need to improve.
     
           - Ratings cause humiliation of people who don't get a
             top rating. It causes destruction of the will to
             contribute.
     
           - Bosses don't really know what people do and
             accomplish even though they argue that they do!
     
           - There is a lack of feedback from others in other
             parts of the system as to an individual's true
             contribution; note those others might be outside the
             company.
     
           - Employees get blamed for faults of the system.
     
           - You really can't measure the contribution of an
             individual within a system.
     
     
         * Dr. Deming held up for public ridicule the recently
    announced approach of IBM with forced-ranking of its people
    and dismissal of the lowest ranked people! It sounds like the
    early warning signal of the demise of IBM a once leading
    people-oriented company.
     
         * An American Cyanamid representative mentioned that
    their R&D organization plans to eliminate performance ratings
    for the Chemicals organization. The key contact was not
    present so I plan to follow up.
     
         * Representatives of many other organizations mentioned
    privately considerable resistance with eliminating
    performance ratings in their companies. The key seems to be
    management's unwillingness to give up something they feel is
    vital. Dr. Deming really challenged their thinking.
     
         * Dr. Deming is also opposed to incentive pay for sales
    people. Many of the reasons are similar to what is discussed
    above but include:
     
           - Sales people work in a system; they don't work in a
             vacuum. It's unfair and arrogant to only reward
             sales people with extra pay.  Many other people
             contribute to the sales but are excluded. This
             causes anger of the others and does not work towards
             optimization of the system as a whole. The notion of
             "pay at risk" for the sales people is not an answer
             to the dilemma; sales incentives for sales people is
             a divisive program!
     
           - Sales incentives may cause the wrong behaviors on
             part of the sales personnel, eg: they might oversell
             a low profit item just to boost sales. Any attempt
             to design around this can be beaten by the sales
             people. After all they are clever, hard-working
             people!
     
           - Sales incentives can't truly measure contribution
             to the system as a whole, eg: mentoring, developing
             future markets, etc.
     
           - Sales incentives tend to cause sub-optimization.
     
           - Sales incentives foster internal competition and
             interfere with "Doing the right thing."
     
           - Sales incentives create expectations and once
             achieved may create negative feelings if managed
             in what is perceived as an arbitrary way.
     
           - Sales incentives lose incentive over time and can
             demotivate.
     
           - Money tends to be the value system in business. It's
             a poor replacement for emotional valuing that people
             need so much.
     
           - Managers claim that sales incentives measure the
             performance of individuals but they're really
             measuring the result of the system in which the
             individuals work.
     
           - Sales incentives bring out the worst in people. They
             create a short-sighted, selfish behavior focused on:
             "What's in it for me?"
     
         * Deming recommends that profits of the business be
    shared equitably with all people in the business.
     
         * He recommended that in a business downturn we take
    action in the following order:
     
           1. Reduce dividends.
           2. Reduce bonuses of top management.
           3. Reduce management salaries starting from the top
              down to the middle of the hierarchy.
           4. Workers are asked to accept pay cuts or a reduction
              in force through attrition or voluntary discharge.
     
         My personal recommendation to anyone reading this is to
    try to attend a Deming seminar as soon as you can. Dr Deming
    has tremendous wisdom to impart focused on what will make
    business successful. Since he is 91, he won't be with us for
    long. He has an amazing schedule of 18 seminars left in 1992;
    if you'd like to attend one, I'd be glad to send a copy of
    the schedule.
     
         Further, I came away more convinced than ever that
    eliminating performance ratings is an important part of
    Dupont achieving its vision of becoming a GREAT GLOBAL
    COMPANY THROUGH PEOPLE. It's an important part of creating:
     
     
                DUPONT: A GREAT PLACE TO WORK
     

    RE:.-1 .. Abolutely brilliant... It gets right to the heart of the
    	      problem... Add to that the cost of all this measuring and you
    	      have a complete picture..
    
    	      How do we (We are DEC) do something to promote this thinking.
    
    Chris

    RE: .119 Digital have been giving an intro to Deming course for
    about 8 years that I know of. The ideas from .118 are pretty much
    all included. It doesn't work if top management doesn't buy off on
    it though.
    
    			Alfred

I agree that the arguments are very good, and there's a lot of good 
stuff that Digital could use in Deming's methodologies.

However, one area of concern relating to the elimination of ranking 
individuals. While I agree in theory, does this mean that everyone is 
rewarded with the same increase in pay every year, regardless of 
performance? I can see where this would spark a lot of abuse of the 
system and mediocre perfomance by individuals who may be less 
motivated than others. (This is not to say that our current so-called 
performance based system is not being abused!)

-Dan

> While I agree in theory, does this mean that everyone is 
>rewarded with the same increase in pay every year, regardless of 
>performance?

	Yes. This is the way things work in teaching (usually) BTW.

> I can see where this would spark a lot of abuse of the 
>system and mediocre perfomance by individuals who may be less 
>motivated than others. 

	This is one of the more common replies to Deming's ideas. On the
	other hand Deming doesn't say that you keep people who don't work.
	Also it's well known (or at least believed by people who study
	motivation) that money is not a good motivator. Once people have
	enough to meet basic needs adding more money is not as good a motivator
	as other things. Like communication, respect, helping them feel
	important and lots of other things that it takes good managers to
	do. Throughing money at people is the easiest but one of the least
	effective ways to get people to work better and harder.


			Alfred

   Re:    <<< Note 1797.122 by CVG::THOMPSON "DCU Board of Directors Candidate" >>>

Managers should be close enough to their people to tell when
somebody isn't pulling his/her own weight.  And then they should
take the appropriate action.  But with the legal/bureaucratic
jumble, something that sensible can't fly.

That is what leads me to believe that any large organization is
doomed to choking on its overhead.  (Excuse my pessimism, as
many of you know, my parent organization has been declared
dead.)  The only way I can see to manage an enterprise that
requires more than a few hundred people is to spin off small
organizations that contract with the parent (but are empowered
to look for other business too).

fwiw,

Dick

    Re: Individuals not pulling their own weight

    	If within a group, someone continues to not pull their own weight,
    a group, by the consensus of the other members, could put much more
    pressure on an individual within the group than our current system at 
    DEC.

    	The group wouldn't even have to get into any specifics. Simply
    saying (with no other explanation) that the rest the group consensus is 
    that they don't want so-and-so as part of the group would have a 
    potentially devastating effect.

    	Of course for this to work, you would probably have to have a group
    ranking system of sorts. I'm not sure if this defeats the purpose or
    not, but it gets the emphasis off of individual rankings.

    	It also sounds like the emphasis needs to be placed on having a
    good motivation and reward system vs. an effective punishment system.

    	Ray

    RE: back a few, paraphrasing: Deming says money isn't a good motivator
        beyond a certain point...

I look forward to the day when money is no longer my primary motivation...

Meanwhile, I'm praying that Prop 2.5 doesn't get repealed...

    
    I am in total agreement that the thing lacking most, and as a result is
    causing the most friction and tension, is the lack of communication. 
    If you look back at some of the initial venting done in this topic, it
    was a result of the manager not sitting down and explaining procedures
    to the employee.  When that occurred, tension was relieved.
    
    I have been trying to tell this to my management for quite some time. 
    There is no substitute for `management by walking around'.  If managers
    do not know what their direct reports are doing, they should not be in
    management.  IMHO, I believe that managers should not only know what
    their reports are doing, but they should take a greater interest in the
    person than in the metrics produced by that person.  The metrics are in
    place to provide a `hands-off' or `object'ive view of how the person is
    doing.  The problem is that we are people and not objects.
    
    Who knows, they might even like us if they got to know us.  8^)
    
    tgc

    Perhaps we are getting off the topic, but I've always been
    fascinated by 'group motivation' and how different groups operate.

    I think the problem we have today is that groups are far too STATIC.
    A group gets formed and it exsists for a LONG time.  In the old
    days, everytime a new project would start, it would create a new
    group, and the manager/supervisor/project leader would 'recruit'
    people s/he wanted for the new group....like choosing up sides
    for baseball.  In general, everyone KNEW who the real workers were
    and who didn't ever get much done (for whatever reason).  The leader
    would tend to only recuit people who got things done.  The other
    people just never got 'recruted' to the new projects.

    Eventually the work in the 'old groups' becomes pretty boring....various
    kinds of support, mundane tasks.  Or it completely goes away.  The
    people who are not working out (in the eyes of their peers) may be
    faced with a real career decision....sell themselves to another group,
    transfer to a different kind of work, etc. etc.

    I favor continuously choosing up sides....it quickly become obvious
    how you are viewed by your peers without it being a 'management'
    imposed ranking.  Maybe this system leans towards an 'old boy' network
    or other 'favoritism', but I dont think it does any more than any
    other system.  I think it does evaluate you more on real performance
    by the people who really know (your peers) than any other way.
    bob

    	Thinking this group idea through a little more, you still need to
    rank (one way or another) the people within the group. If you don't,
    you could wind up in a lose/lose situation such as -

    	one person out of X doesn't share the load but gets the same raise as
    	everyone else in the group or,

    	the whole group gets a poor raise (or in trouble) because one person 
    	screwed up.

    	The latter is the approach used by the military, and not one that I
    find very appealing.

    	Maybe money in and of itself isn't a motivating factor (and I don't
    necessarily agree with that), but the lack of money could be a demotivating
    factor. Union shops, where everyone gets the same raise regardless of
    what they do, seems to portray this.

    	The inverse of this would be getting paid for piece-work. This type
    of pay structure seemed to generate (at least quantity wise)
    significant motivation. The quality factor is fairly easy to design in
    too (i.e. you only get paid for quality pieces.)

    	Ray

I have a number of questions regarding the interpretations of Demming that I have
seen. But, giving him the benefit of the doubt since he is so highly regarded,
he might have good answers for all of them.

As far as the treating everyone in a group the same goes, unless you have the
proper cultural context it flat out don't work.  Just ask the Auto-unions or the
CIS (late USSR) about it. In DEC I have found that the greatest de-motivator of
all is the equal treatment of un-equal performance.

It is inevitably the fact that a negative performer (one who does more harm than 
good) is allowed to continue on a project and even shares in any rewards that
drives people the craziest. For example, there once was a person who was allowed
to come in late produce little and bad mouth the project to outsiders with 
impugnity. Virtually everyone on the project complained of this person's
behaviour yet management did nothing visible about correcting the situation.
Continued complaints were met with advice to "mind your own business". Attempts
at peer pressure were negligible as the individual felt no shame or concern at
being ostracized. (any more active pressure, such as public berating, was 
deemed unacceptable by management) To make a long story short, this  led
to many good people either leaving, or taking the "Why should I bust my tail?"
attitude.

This is similar to the Union problems and the Communist collapse. Equal treatment
will bring equal behaviour AT THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR.  This is not true
in all cultures. I wouldn't be surprised if in Japan it is different, and may be
why the Japanese have taken to Demming so readily.

If we want that sort of process to work here, it seems necessary to insure that 
the teams have the power to discipline and/or expell non-cooperative individuals.
That would be a culture shock indeed.

Alan

    It can work in the Auto industry.  You may recall the success that
    Toyota had (is having?) changing a GM plant totally around in the
    north U.S.  I think its name was NUMMI (?) and showed GM that you
    can convert even the most hardened 'anti' folks into being more
    productive and efficient if you involve them and treat them equitably.
    
    Calvin

I've read a little bit about the NUMMI plant in California, but not enough to 
know if its experience is relevant to my reply .130.

Having worked closely with and been part of several different unions, and having
extensively studied the Communist economic system, I can state with great 
confidence that the notion that merely treating everyone "equally" will not bring
forth quality, and in fact is more likely (when taken alone) to provide the
opposite.  

There's much more to quality than that. I'm sure that Demming would
be the first to agree. As I said before, I am not familiar with his ideas except
as buzz-words related at a distance. Slogans never have a long lasting, positive
effect. And, again, I have some serious problems with the implications of many
of these Demmingisms  (Demmingism - slogan purporting to summarize Demming's 
ideas). 


Alan

re -.2;

The problem is not just equal-pay-for-unequal-work.  The problem is that 
many managers use metrics and awards to incite frantic competition among
their employees.  Then, at the end of the year,  it turns out that the 
monetary difference between goofing off and killing yourself is barely 
computable and that the awards go to those with the best PR skills.

I could deal with a policy that gave me a raise based on company/group 
performance and expected everyone to do what was necessary to achieve 
those goals.  I could deal with a system that strongly linked pay to 
individual performance.  Where I have trouble is a system that streeses 
individual metrics and then leaves managers with little flexibility in
rewarding the achievers.

-dave

    
    what Demming has been trying to get across is that cooperation and
    teamwork are required to make large system process work, and that
    management behavior that singles out individuals, particularly
    individuals who break the process in calling attention to themselves,
    has a much greater negative impact than any benefit.
    
    I think I know this to be true.  Of course there's gonna be all you
    lone individuals who cause disruption in the name of the right cause
    who feel all we need are perfect managers, but folks, that beast doesn't
    exist anymore than wonderous creature you perceive in the mirror. I've
    done my share of damage, and i hope i've become wiser for it.
    
    Teams require a variety of roles in order to be successful, and what 
    Demming is trying to get across is more often than not, system failure
    occurs by not having the right people in the right roles. You have to
    focus on what each role requires, and then assign people accordingly.
    Oh yea, and this is an ongoing, always changing process.  I know
    it's a lot simpler to just blame each other, but there is solid
    evidence to prove that does not work at all.   He is not saying that
    you never terminate individuals, but it should the course of last
    resort, not the first.
    
    	bob

Re: .134

	"You have to focus on what each role requires, and then assign people 
	accordingly."


	Oh how true, BUT.....


	It is difficult to assign people accordingly when people are seen as
	inter-changeable "resources". To assign the right person (singular)
	to a particular role it is important that the mangement which is 
	making the assignment understands the individual nature of the 
	assignee.   Note, unless cultural pressures have actually reduced a 
	population to a near clone like similarity, individuals, with all that
	implies, is what you get to work with.  Maybe that's why Demming has
	caught on better in Japan.

Alan

PS  You also have to have management capable of discerning who can and can't fill
    a particular role. Incompetent management will assign the wrong person more
    often than the right person.

    re: .135
    
    I agree that those doing the assigning have to know the people and
    their strengths and weakness to make good assignments. Something which
    you didn't mention, but which seems woefully lacking, is that the
    assigner must also understand the *nature of the assignment*. 
    
    It has been my experience that many of those doing the assigning have
    absolutely no experience in the jobs that their IC's are doing. Most of
    this seems to comes from the 80's view, widely held in the US field,
    that a "manager" can "manage" anything. First-line managers who have
    ever done a job even remotely like the job their IC's do are very much
    the exception.
    
    Has this been the experience of others? If so, is it a problem?

   Re:        <<< Note 1797.136 by SWAM2::MCCARTHY_LA "Lie to exit pollers" >>>

Well, some of them _have_worked_ in the past! :-)

And that about defines "goodness".  Managers whose last point of
contact with "real work" may be ten years old certainly aren't
going to be real good at understanding today's work load if the
underlying technology has changed.  But its amazing how many
things haven't.  

fwiw,

Dick

Ironically, I find myself defending the concept of "a manager can manage 
anything".  The thing is that ALL managers should be manageing people, so, there
is a large grain of truth to the "manage anything" view.

However, that said, there is a huge difference between LEADING and managing. It 
has been my experience in and out of the IS world or DEC, that a leader is not
effective unless he/she understands the task at hand.  It is up to a manager to
make sure that the leaders are in  charge, and support them as needed.

To use an "out world" example; a building contractor "manages" the construction
of a house; BUT, it is the foremen/master craftsmen that lead the work. It is
these leaders that can make a job go faster and better. The "manager" put them in
charge and got them what they needed to do the job, when they needed it.

In my most humble opinion, the problem with DEC (and all too much of American
society) is that "managers" are expected to automatically be leaders as well. And
the traits which make a good manager (attention to detail, sensitivity to all
points of view, etc.) are mostly at variance with what it takes to be a good 
leader (singleness of purpose, broad perspective, personal loyalty, etc.)
And as a result, we have way to many managers, while the leaders are frustrated
with their inability to get the job done.

As with any other generalizations, there are exceptions. But the exceptions to 
this tend to be remembered as great people since the combining of leadership and
managerial talent in one individual is so rare.

Alan

re: .138

>And as a result, we have way to many managers, while the leaders are frustrated
>with their inability to get the job done.

I agree with everything you say except this statement.  We have fewer managers
than leaders, i would say.  But the leaders have been promoted into positions
where they should by rights be managing: i.e., thinking heavily about people
and workload issues, hiring, deploying, disciplining, setting priorities,
getting people's skills upgraded to match current and future needs, following
up on how the work is going, removing obstacles from the path of the workers,
listening to find out what people need to make the job go more smoothly, etc.

The ex-leaders are not good at this stuff, so they look for other things to
do to impress their bosses, and maintain their own images of themselves as
effective contributors.  They get involved in organizational wars, more and
more abstract technical or business consulting, etc.  So their people end up
both leaderless and lacking in management support.  In other words this is NOT
like a Japanese company where a manager has 50 direct reports and spends most
of his/her time focusing on the needs of those people.
									paul

There certainly are many cases like those you describe. In my, albeit small, neck
of the woods the leaders are not the folk who get elevated. What happens all too
often is that the leaders want to stay put, and do, as individual contributors
and less successful (but more ambitious?) ICs are "promoted?" to management. 

Once there their charters authorize them to make the decisions that should be
left to the "leaders". These folks are neither managers nor leaders and try to
act as the latter rather than the former cause it is easier to comprehend what
you're supposed to accomplish.

I definitely agree that we have more leaders than managers. Unfortunately
we have too many people who pretend to be managers.

Alan

    Well some good news for a change. That deal I mentioned at the bottom
    of .66? We (DEC) won. Frankly, I don't give a damn how the money gets
    carved up internally. It's just nice to win one once in a while.
    
    Gene.
    

    
    
    			CONGRATULATIONS!  One is a start.
    
    Jan

    I posted Note 1829 as a fresh/new set of suggested metrics.  It is
    long, but I welcome comment from those who wish to take the time to
    digest it.  Today, I sent it to DELTA.  Hopefully they wouldn't kill
    us.

    man 'o man i am really confused now. i stand by .0. the names, places,
    and especially the buzzwords have changed but the metric issues are
    worse than ever. being a network software consultant and slapped with a
    budget for the first time, my initial inqueries are: OK, what are my
    metrics and what will i get credit for to help me achieve my budget?
    the answers were/are very confusing so i asked:
    
     1. I helped sell a DEC/IBM integration solution (actually i did 90% of 
        the work) for $125K. do i get any credit for that? nope.
    
     2. I am the chief technical person on a multimillion, multiyear e-mail
        proposal. good chance we'll win. i worked on it for 2 years. do i
        get any credit for this? nope.
    
     3. I am working with a customer that is buying our DECnis routers to
        build a nationwide network. myself and another guy were
        instramental in saving this sale. the customer will buy a couple
        dozen more DECnis this year. do i get any credit for this? yes! 5%
        of the total sale. sales rep get 100%. if I would have sold other
        3rd party routers i would have gotten 100% credit but the sales
        rep only 50% so he's not interested in that route.
    
    lets not forget. i am network consultant for Digital.
    
     4. I've been working with a customer for several years and in the
        last six months have got them to agree on using our Postmaster
        product for 600 of their PCs. Do I get any credit for this? nope.
    
     5. A local company is evaluating our Gigaswitch product. I've been
        involved for 4 months. I did the initial PID presentations and
        follow up network support. beaucoup dollars here. do i get any
        credit for this? nope.
    
     6. Just this week i had to drop everything and do a token ring, VAX,
        SNA integration thing for 5 VP's and a bunch of techies at a local
        bank. We saved the deal. Do I get any credit for this? nope.
    
    and it goes on and on. frankly, i DON'T want credit for any of this. i 
    would just as soon all this "funny money" stuff would go away. 
    
    so the casual observer may ask: well WHAT do you get credit for? the 
    answer is i don't know for sure. so the next obvious question is why do 
    i spend my time working on things i don't get credit for? simple. it's 
    what customers want from me and dec. 
    
    so once again we reorganize and shuffle head counts around all under
    the banner of "customer focus" and end with a set of metrics that will
    accomplish little in the way of customer satisfaction.
    
    so tell me. how long before i get axed when i can help dec sell 
    literally millions of dollars worth of networking stuff this quarter 
    alone and end up with virtually no funny money in my account? and yes.
    i have had this discussion with various management on several
    occasions. they simply state "dont' worry about it". that's what they
    told the last guy. he was tfso'd in June.
    
    the metrics are killing us.

    re: .144
    
    You're making a connection between the downsizing and your performance
    on the job.  That connection doesn't exist for you unless you are a
    direct sales rep (thus your insulation from the reward program).
    
    I believe you are probably referring to monetary compensation when you
    speak of rewards.  To get qualified for the reward you have to have a
    sales job code and live a different axe.  There is no 8 to 5 rule for
    sales.  There is a penalty clause, however, that translates to
    "no-make-budget, no-have-job".
    
    There is also a little thing like "you only get paid 80% of salary,
    other 20% if you are on track with your budget".  The reward for your
    outstanding work will be recognized by your local team.  This means
    either that your hard work is undervalued or your hard work is
    over-rated.  Either way you're dealing with a communication problem.
    
    I'd suggest talking it over with your local sales team and manager.
    
    Chuck
    

    ref .118
    
    W. Edwards Deming the highly  regarded quality and management innovator
    who became a legend in his time passed away a few days ago in his sleep
    at the age of 93.
    We can only hope his ideas become better known and implemented by
    business management during these critical competative years ahead.