[Sigia-l] Are you ready for it?

[Listera]

"Richard_Dalton at vanguard.com" wrote:

> Wow ... so much negativity towards large organizations and their needs.
> (side question - do/have any of you worked for large organizations?).

Most of my clients over the last decade have been some of the largest
enterprises around, so I get to observe it closely without the distortion of
having to have a stake in a fixed job position/title inside.

Its like the proverbial buying of tomatoes in a supermarket. They look red
but you know they are going to taste like chalk. Yes, there are many
logistical reasons as to why most supermarkets can't carry really fresh
produce, but that doesn't change the fact that the stuff you get at a
roadside stand by a farm will be infinitely better. Supermarkets can do a
lot of things better than that farm stand, carrying perishable produce just
picked right off the field is not one of them.

Most large enterprises are slow, inefficient and rigid. (Yep, I just said
that.) Most small consulting units, for example, are not. This is not a
value judgment, it's just the nature of things: you have to have a thicker
layer of bureaucracy in a large organization. Smaller organization that have
the metabolism and inertia of large corporations often die young.

Just look at the process of hiring. With a large organization, you get
elephantine job reqs, meetings with the HR dept, multiple meetings with
managers and managers of managers, etc. With a small outfit, it wouldn't be
a huge surprise if you get a direct meeting with the proprietor as your
first and last contact.

> As someone who does work in a large organization where teamwork is very
> important I can confidently say that there is a purpose for the evil "Job
> Title" that has been missed - it can be an effective way of identifying roles
> and responsibilities within a team.

I hope you're not being facetious with this. Isn't this the whole problem:
that you have to give people funny titles just to keep track of what they
do?
 
> You don't say "the guy who calls the numbers and throws the ball" in
> football do you?

No, in a small organization, I'd just call him Jack. I don't need to refer
to him as the guy who's the assistant vp, at the department of redundancy
department in New York, Manufacturing, Eastern Region, U.S. I probably have
a beer with Jack twice a week. I'm genuinely interested in how Jack's doing
(like everybody else), because our small organization cannot possibly afford
people not performing at their best. Jack cannot blend into the woodwork in
our small organization, there just isn't the room and we'd notice it
immediately. Jack doesn't spend an inordinate amount of his time on internal
office politics, as our small organization just doesn't have the time. Jack
wears multiple hats/titles and he's supremely focused on getting the project
finished, as we can't hide our losses as well as a large corporation can.
Jack probably doesn't care if you call him IA, ID, UXD or some other epitaph
because he knows he's responsible for the front-end design, no matter what
the latest buzzword is, and if he doesn't get it done nobody else will.

Now I gotta go, Jack's calling.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba