<story><title>Efficiency Is the Enemy</title><url>https://fs.blog/2021/05/slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlac</author><text>The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally.&lt;p&gt;For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.&lt;p&gt;This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.</text></item><item><author>allenu</author><text>Something that I&amp;#x27;ve noticed recently is that in my work life, I&amp;#x27;m finding there&amp;#x27;s more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of &amp;quot;efficiency&amp;quot;. When you encounter a problem to solve, there&amp;#x27;s often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there&amp;#x27;s a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what&amp;#x27;s best to do next.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There&amp;#x27;s little room to diverge or think about what you&amp;#x27;re doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself &amp;quot;costs&amp;quot; something. In a sense, you&amp;#x27;re punished for doing things differently.&lt;p&gt;That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cratermoon</author><text>A lot of medium-to-large organizations used to have dedicated administrative staff, not just for senior management, but for everyone. It was good because the people in the admin pools were experts at navigating the organizational structures. They did it every day, all the time, for everyone, so they knew the tricks.&lt;p&gt;In the interest of cutting labor costs, those jobs were cut, and self-service systems like the ones you describe became the standard.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been around long enough to remember a time when, if I needed to travel for work, someone made all the arrangements, and just handed me tickets and an itinerary. I was really junior at the time, it was just how travel was done.&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;m pretty senior, but not senior enough to have my own assistant. I get paid a lot more, too. But employers seem to think it&amp;#x27;s more efficient for me to spend a day figuring out the corporate travel portal to plan and book my trip than to pay an expert to get it done in an hour or so.</text></comment>
<story><title>Efficiency Is the Enemy</title><url>https://fs.blog/2021/05/slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlac</author><text>The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally.&lt;p&gt;For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.&lt;p&gt;This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.</text></item><item><author>allenu</author><text>Something that I&amp;#x27;ve noticed recently is that in my work life, I&amp;#x27;m finding there&amp;#x27;s more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of &amp;quot;efficiency&amp;quot;. When you encounter a problem to solve, there&amp;#x27;s often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there&amp;#x27;s a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what&amp;#x27;s best to do next.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There&amp;#x27;s little room to diverge or think about what you&amp;#x27;re doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself &amp;quot;costs&amp;quot; something. In a sense, you&amp;#x27;re punished for doing things differently.&lt;p&gt;That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmmmmm</author><text>&amp;gt; all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently&lt;p&gt;Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do) and somebody &amp;quot;loaned&amp;quot; me their PA to do the booking because it takes much time and knowledge to do it right. Part of the problem is that the org has implemented a gigantic set of strict rules about what kinds of flights can be booked to save money. So it can be quite hard to select the right flight that won&amp;#x27;t get knocked back further downstream or alternatively navigate through the forms to justify why you aren&amp;#x27;t selecting a compliant flight...</text></comment>