Coping With Dilbertization of the Workplace
What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.
--management quote
Everybody who has a cubicle in corporate America understands why “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams is a rich man. His cartoon collections are best-sellers simply because they ring so true. The quote that appears in italics above, and those that follow, came to me via the Internet and are, I’m told, actual statements collected for a magazine’s “Dilbert” sound-alike contest.
Wayne McKay can relate. McKay, a 43-year-old Lancaster resident, is a Department of Water and Power employee who, as the Dilbertian phrase would have it, “thinks outside the box.” DWP management acknowledged that McKay has delivered valuable innovations that the utility uses every day. But what he’s gotten back from the DWP, McKay says, is a lot more frustration than appreciation.
The story, as McKay tells it, may especially dismay both ratepayers and fellow workers at the DWP, which is now trying to pay off more than $4 billion in debt while also facing massive staff cuts prompted by the looming deregulation of the electricity industry. McKay isn’t David and the DWP isn’t Goliath; McKay sees himself as a loyal member of the DWP team. It is rather a story, in McKay’s telling, of how a good idea for modernization struggles against the inertia ingrained in a monolithic institution--indeed, in this case, a monopoly.
DWP management, of course, tells a somewhat different story. Michael Alonzo, senior executive in revenue protection, discounts suggestions that bureaucracy conspired against a worthy idea. Alonzo acknowledges, however, that internal politics often worked against McKay, and McKay often did little to help his own cause.
How long is this Beta guy going to keep testing our stuff?
Whether McKay is a Beta guy, I don’t know, but he is a computer guy. When he wasn’t working as a customer service representative at the DWP’s large Sun Valley facility, McKay was often playing computer games. Often he wondered why the “revenue protection unit” used antiquated systems.
McKay performed the arcane function of reviewing and processing what the DWP calls “exception reports” concerning bills that contain aberrations, which may or may not be errors. He and his colleagues would tediously pore over hard copy line by line and enter data into a computer.
The problems, as McKay saw it, were specific and not unknown. Utility bills are unusually complex; there was, McKay says, no off-the-shelf computer program that comprehends the billing cycle and its many variables. And though he had never written a computer program before, McKay decided to give it a try, working long hours at home on his own time and at his own expense.
On Jan. 3, 1996, McKay formally introduced the computer program he calls “Collections Suite,” which he claimed would automate several report processing functions and dramatically improve efficiency.
It was, if McKay says so himself, quite a feat for a novice programmer: “I’m sort of like the rookie who hit a home run the first time in the box.”
McKay’s immediate supervisor at the time, Lonnie Sliger, suggests that McKay hit a long foul ball. Her crew tested McKay’s program for several weeks and found it wanting. “It saved keystrokes, but not time,” she says. A five-point report was issued recommending that McKay’s program be rejected, suggesting its drawbacks might outweigh its benefits.
McKay complicated matters, Sliger says, by reacting defensively and secretively to legitimate questions. “He’s very, very difficult to work with,” she said.
Alonzo added: “If you can’t figure out how to sell your ideas, the best ideas normally die.”
Despite the initially cool response, DWP management saw fit to move McKay from Sliger’s unit and have him do programming full time. He worked to improve “Collections Suite” and embarked on other tasks as well. Over the next several months, more workers tried his program and liked it, while others remained resistant.
No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We’ve been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I’ll let you know when it’s time to tell them.
Not even McKay suggests he solved a problem in a day. But one Monday in September 1996, McKay says, he and a colleague started to tackle one unit’s backlog of exception reports and, using his program, finished a month’s worth of chores by Thursday. “In fact they were hiding work from us,” he claims.
Under DWP policy, McKay says, his suggestion was supposed to be either formally accepted or rejected within 60 days. More than two years later, however, neither has happened. Yet use of the program has grown.
There was still so much resistance, however, that McKay recently complained to Alonzo that his program was being underutilized despite obvious advantages. Alonzo, whom McKay considers an ally in his efforts, ordered more evaluation. The executive says that while he is convinced McKay’s program has merit, there are still glitches that result in insufficient documentation. The program, Alonzo says, has been known to issue termination orders when warnings are appropriate.
Alonzo and McKay agree that, with the coming deregulation and cutbacks, the DWP is going to have to find a way for fewer people to do more work, or service will suffer. This, McKay says, is why he started work on his program long ago: “I’ve worked there a long time. I have friends and some family there. I really do want the company to survive deregulation.”
McKay’s initiative might be compared favorably to the Castaic power plant worker who one day last summer, looking for something to read over lunch, grabbed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules and read fine print suggesting that Castaic was exempt from a certain licensing fee the DWP had paid. DWP management, which evidently fell asleep reading the fine print, was pleased to get the $1.1 million rebate. The worker got a $25,000 bonus.
So how much money has McKay received for his collections program? Not a dime so far, he says, though he expects that some day that may change. Whether his program is as big an improvement as he claims, I don’t know. But one would think a bad idea presented with poor salesmanship would have been dead a long time ago. And one would think that, after two years in a climate of impending deregulation, the DWP would have a better idea of whether McKay’s program deserves wider use.
McKay, meanwhile, says he is more frustrated than bitter, and that he’s grateful the DWP has helped him develop his programming skills, making him more marketable in the face of cutbacks. He has even developed a “next generation” collections program on his own time that he is hoping to license to the DWP--but that’s another story. At any rate, he seems confident that, with deregulation, some utility somewhere will benefit.
And one management type somewhere once said:
Turnover is good for the company, as it proves that we are doing a good job in training people.
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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.
