We had an auditor declare we needed a licencing scheme for our developers. So, at great expense, a Competency Management System (CMS) was implemented, from on high.
Every quarter, every developer had to update his CMS. This meant proving his competence in every category of is job, both development wise (coding standard, design reviews, etc.), and subject matter (show understanding of vertical speed acceleration, dead reckoning, steerpoints, etc.) There were about a dozen development elements, and 50 to 200 subjects, depending on the developer's role in the company.
To prove competence, he'd have to review the BR (bug reports) he'd resolved that quarter, determine which subject matters the BR applied to, and fill in a spreadsheet saying "BR #93813 shows understanding of VSE, BR #398731 shows understanding of DR", etc. He'd then have to print off the front page of the BR into a logbook. If he hadn't resolved a bug, he'd have to find an email, meeting minutes, or something similar.
Some logbooks filled a 5" binder, with several hundred indexed pages, and the developer actually had a second binder.
The assessor would then review the logbook, identify any gaps, and return it to management. If the developer couldn't prove competence in Airframe Torque, because he'd never done anything with it, management's job was to find something for him to do in AT so he could learn. If the logbook showed everything was okay, the assessor would bless it, and the developer would get a laminated card with a licence number.
Five years later, the auditors returned to review it. What they found was that the company had fully implemented CMS. Developers averaged spending between 3 and 12 work days per year just on compliance. Two full time assessors did nothing but reviews. And the difference in productivity and quality was exactly nothing. That was extremely unusual, the auditor said.
Digging deeper, the auditors looked into how it was being applied, and were confused. They called a big meeting with the developers to discuss it.
"It's strange. You go through all the effort of compliance - you log the work, assess it, and you have all of the tools needed to properly identify which engineer is the best suited to a specific task, and what skill sets are available to you. So when a problem appears in an area requiring specific skill, you know exactly who is the best person to solve the problem efficiently. But instead of using it to improve quality and productivity, seems like you ignore it and just assign problems to whoever happens to be available at the time."
My team lead asked "You mean we were supposed to use this for something?"
The shocked auditor said "Yes, of course. You spend man years of effort every year documenting your capabilities, assessing them, and formally licencing them. Why would you do it if you didn't get any benefit from it?"
My team lead said "Management said we had to do it".
The auditor said "Oh, come on. Nobody thought to ask what benefit there was for it? You aren't saying that management just told you to do something that you saw absolutely no reason for, and you did it just because they said to, are you?"
"Of course", my team lead said, "we do things like that all the time", as everyone in the room nodded in agreement.
The auditor asked follow up questions and discovered that developers were required to write reports that went into network folders that reviewers didn't have access to, three different teams had been assigned to build the same component with no knowledge of the other two, several teams were following a process that had been discontinued two years earlier that management had forgotten to inform them about (and would have to be redone in the new process), and several developers were working overtime to implement a function that the customer had decided they didn't want anyway.
Why had the company called in auditors? Because for some inexplicable reason, despite having lots of contracts and "the industry leading technology", which was "rock solid, proven and tested" (posters on the wall confirmed this fact), the company somehow kept on losing money, and they simply couldn't understand the reason.
We had an auditor declare we needed a licencing scheme for our developers. So, at great expense, a Competency Management System (CMS) was implemented, from on high.
Every quarter, every developer had to update his CMS. This meant proving his competence in every category of is job, both development wise (coding standard, design reviews, etc.), and subject matter (show understanding of vertical speed acceleration, dead reckoning, steerpoints, etc.) There were about a dozen development elements, and 50 to 200 subjects, depending on the developer's role in the company.
To prove competence, he'd have to review the BR (bug reports) he'd resolved that quarter, determine which subject matters the BR applied to, and fill in a spreadsheet saying "BR #93813 shows understanding of VSE, BR #398731 shows understanding of DR", etc. He'd then have to print off the front page of the BR into a logbook. If he hadn't resolved a bug, he'd have to find an email, meeting minutes, or something similar.
Some logbooks filled a 5" binder, with several hundred indexed pages, and the developer actually had a second binder.
The assessor would then review the logbook, identify any gaps, and return it to management. If the developer couldn't prove competence in Airframe Torque, because he'd never done anything with it, management's job was to find something for him to do in AT so he could learn. If the logbook showed everything was okay, the assessor would bless it, and the developer would get a laminated card with a licence number.
Five years later, the auditors returned to review it. What they found was that the company had fully implemented CMS. Developers averaged spending between 3 and 12 work days per year just on compliance. Two full time assessors did nothing but reviews. And the difference in productivity and quality was exactly nothing. That was extremely unusual, the auditor said.
Digging deeper, the auditors looked into how it was being applied, and were confused. They called a big meeting with the developers to discuss it.
"It's strange. You go through all the effort of compliance - you log the work, assess it, and you have all of the tools needed to properly identify which engineer is the best suited to a specific task, and what skill sets are available to you. So when a problem appears in an area requiring specific skill, you know exactly who is the best person to solve the problem efficiently. But instead of using it to improve quality and productivity, seems like you ignore it and just assign problems to whoever happens to be available at the time."
My team lead asked "You mean we were supposed to use this for something?"
The shocked auditor said "Yes, of course. You spend man years of effort every year documenting your capabilities, assessing them, and formally licencing them. Why would you do it if you didn't get any benefit from it?"
My team lead said "Management said we had to do it".
The auditor said "Oh, come on. Nobody thought to ask what benefit there was for it? You aren't saying that management just told you to do something that you saw absolutely no reason for, and you did it just because they said to, are you?"
"Of course", my team lead said, "we do things like that all the time", as everyone in the room nodded in agreement.
The auditor asked follow up questions and discovered that developers were required to write reports that went into network folders that reviewers didn't have access to, three different teams had been assigned to build the same component with no knowledge of the other two, several teams were following a process that had been discontinued two years earlier that management had forgotten to inform them about (and would have to be redone in the new process), and several developers were working overtime to implement a function that the customer had decided they didn't want anyway.
Why had the company called in auditors? Because for some inexplicable reason, despite having lots of contracts and "the industry leading technology", which was "rock solid, proven and tested" (posters on the wall confirmed this fact), the company somehow kept on losing money, and they simply couldn't understand the reason.
Never gets old❤️❤️❤️🔥Well done Bob