About murkiness

You can’t have “murky places” in a company.
A murky place is a place in a company where you don’t understand exactly what’s going on and can’t figure it out quickly. Some people are doing some tasks there (probably for some customers).
It’s not always the “murky” place that generates problems or loss. There have been “profitable” murky places in the history of Corada – one indispensable specialist, who has everything in his head, works with one client, who is generally happy with everything. And such a design has even brought in money.
But the risks, I think, are not even worth explaining. If the client says “I resent you, you have failed me”, or the specialist says “I quit tomorrow”, the scheme that “works – don’t touch” fell apart immediately. Not to mention the fact that this “successful” experience cannot be repeated.
Then all ended well for us. The client terminated the contract (not because of us, upper management decided to take the processes inhouse). The employee said he was not ready to work differently, under control, with reporting and so on, and left. You can say we got off easy.
It was many years ago.
Since then we have been struggling with turbidity at our customers – we systematically help to understand the processes, to go through all the steps together, to find those steps that different people do differently, or do not do at all. And then we help to implement these new processes in the new information system.
But recently, we have been sinful and we have let ourselves get into a muddy place again. Now, in dealing with the consequences, I’m trying to understand how it happened. We are system guys. Revealed a sequence of steps, which has now become forbidden to me.
Imagine in the shoes of a hero – a top salesman, production manager, warehouse manager, or any other key employee.

Someone in the company is cool, doing a great job and getting results.

He starts breaking company rules for little things – but he is mega-productive, and you go along with him.

The number of such violations increases – because he is productive and brings results. He’s allowed to.

We increase the volume of projects and tasks – as long as the person copes with them, everything is fine.

If he stops coping, there is a simple way: to hire assistants, programmers, give him resources in general.

Unfortunately, all the new people work the same way. And you thought? )

The argument you’ll hear here when trying to stop and get things in order will be “should I work, or should I write plans?”, “which is more important – finishing everything or following the rules?”, and of course “there are clients waiting!”

Unfortunately, working in this mode will lead to problems either on the part of clients who will stop getting work/products on time. Or your mega-productive employee will … burn out. He’ll get tired and quit, yes. Tired of the chaos and responsibility for everything around him, of having everything in his head and everything depending solely on him. People like to work in order, for the most part.
The conclusion is very simple. There can be no alternative to “do you want me to get you there, or do you want me to obey the traffic rules?” The correct answer is “I want to get to the place with traffic rules enforced on the way: leave when I planned and arrive on time.”
If something in your company is going the way of creating “turbidity” stop before it’s too late. The “it’s still working” argument is a very bad one.