A story that won’t surprise anyone who has ever worked in a large bureaucracy is still eye opening — even Scott Adams’ Dilbert characters have it easier to get their suggestions implemented:
It was the summer of 2010, and the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) was about to launch the Employee Innovation Program — kind of like the employee suggestion drop box by the water cooler.
Except, nothing like it at all, as TBS employee Anna Bevilacqua was about to discover.
[. . .]
The employees who answered the call for creativity had to follow several rules, including: An employee could not make a suggestion without his or her boss’ approval; and proposals that might lead to a change in TBS policy would be rejected.
Managers tracked the proposals using a spreadsheet that noted the date and exact time a proposal was received, whether an individual or team of workers made the submission and the date it was received by a committee of three TBS managers.
The program designed to cut waste was taking shape. A bloated, forbidding shape.
[. . .]
Four managers formed a “Sub-Committee for Initial Triage” to conduct a “pre-screening” of the proposals. The selection process would be guided by a flow chart with text inside parallelograms and rectangles connected by arrows.
[. . .]
Bevilacqua needed to complete an “implementation framework” document. If she failed to “clearly define objectives, benefits, deliverables, exclusions, assumptions, responsibilities, estimated costs and timelines,” if her plan did not identify possible “slippage in target dates,” if it did not use a “risk log” or a “risk mapping approach,” it could die in Phase Two.
She and the other applicants were warned: “A wrong plan is worse than having no plan at all.”
[. . .]
The vetting and revising and perfecting continued. Each surviving proposal was screened by the Treasury Board’s chief information officer, deputy chief financial officer and chief financial officer.
[. . .]
The months of meetings, memos and emails confirmed her idea was a no-brainer. Her plan would be put into action.
A congratulatory note was vetted by three people before it was sent to her.
Then, the extensive trail of TBS paper — nearly 550 pages obtained by the Star through Access to Information legislation — ends in late 2010.
The employee who suggested this had already retired before the suggestion was implemented — and it was implemented outside the suggestion program anyway. The final line of the article sums it up perfectly: “Not one employee has received a cash award.”
H/T to Andrew Coyne:
https://twitter.com/acoyne/statuses/217238022482169857
