‘An IT issue’ was the rallying cry when over 12,000 cases of Covid were missed from the reports and not followed up by the track and trace teams… ’An IT issue’ my arse!
It’s always a shame when leadership fail to hold themselves accountable. As at least one newspaper reported, the average GCSE student knows the limitations of older versions of Excel, so why did a government body see fit to use that as the tool for basing our Covid reporting and track and trace system on? Had the leadership spoken and listened (the really important part) to their team, I am sure that they would have had feedback that Excel was not the right tool. Why, of course it’s an amazing tool for testing and developing ideas/systems quickly and easily, but to use it to base a life critical system on, no thanks!
I am sure that feedback was received, but what then?
Opinions – we all have them, and very good they are too, so long as we understand what they are and how to value them.
A seasoned lean expert knows all too well how to turn opinions into data – A clearly defined problem statement, followed by a SWOT analysis maybe, or just a simple scoring system, and before you know it, options can be whittled down into data driven logic, and the right solution to any problem can be determined.
Yes, hard coding is more time consuming and more expensive, in the first instance, but front loading always saves more in the longer term. In my Ford days, analysis revealed that some auto manufacturers were designing 3.5 cars (due to numerous iterations of design) for every one they put onto the road. At the same time, Toyota were designing 1.5 cars to every one. Given that a new car costs £billions in development costs, the waste was enormous!
• Excel – cheap, quick, flexible
• Hard coding – slightly more expensive, takes slightly longer, very rigid – more difficult to make changes
Given it’s for a life critical system, I know which option I would choose…
But if we take this back to the workplace, how many organisations, possibly even your own, do you know that run on spreadsheets? Yes, we all know the benefits, but we also know what happens when ‘Fred’ who designed it, goes off sick – no-one else knows how to change or use it. Then what about the number of times we have made a modification to how it works, and then some other functionality fails, sometimes without us even knowing it’s gone wrong for weeks or even months – yes, change management, something else a lean expert knows about in depth.
I often liken it to driving home a screw into wood with a hammer – if the only tool that that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Yes, it will do the job, you can drive it home, and it will fix, for a while, but removing it is difficult, and the two bits of wood don’t really stay together as well as if they had been screwed and glued.
Across many businesses, huge opportunities are missed due to lack of knowledge and experience.
Excel-gate was not a technical issue, but a failure of leadership to reach out to the right people and ask for help to come up with the best solution.
What kind of leader are you?